Since its November launch, Nintendo's Amiibo toy line has mostly been used to unlock cosmetic bonuses in Wii U and Nintendo 3DS games. That changed last week with a downloadable update to Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, whose new puzzle-filled mode requires a supply-limited Toad figurine to unlock.

The new "hide-and-seek" mode, while admittedly simple, strays significantly from its source game. It asks players to rotate and scour the game's small, detailed levels to find a hidden, animated "pixel Toad" icon somewhere on the walls. Once you see one, tap it on the gamepad's screen to clear the challenge; these, like a Where's Waldo book, range from stupidly easy to "holy crap where the heck is Toad" hard, especially since the icon sometimes runs around the level. As of press time, this mode only unlocks with a Toad Amiibo; other Mario series toys will only unlock boring old bonus lives in the game.

A quick glance at sites like Amazon, Best Buy, and Gamestop shows that the Toad figure is already hard to come by online and low in stock at brick-and-mortar locations; it hasn't risen to $100-plus gold Mario levels, but Captain Toad completists may want to rush to get in on the hide-and-seek action. We have asked Nintendo whether the company plans to make this mode available without the Amiibo or whether to expect more intense Amiibo-specific game content in the near future, and we'll update this report with any response.

When we first got our greasy mitts on a few Amiibos (or is the plural something weird like Amiibo or Amiiboea?), we remarked on how they didn't connect to compatible games in very interesting ways. Until now, when you've tapped an Amiibo to your Wii U or 3DS, the results are usually little more than cosmetic boosts (like new outfits in Mario Kart 8), in-game bonuses (like weapons in Hyrule Warriors), or largely rehashed gameplay modes (like Mario Party 10 and Super Smash Bros).

These kinds of optional extras differ from the kind of locked game content you can access with similar Skylanders or Disney Infinity figures and seem more in line with what Nintendo chief Satoru Iwata was describing when he told Time Magazine that Amiibos were not "a trend follower." To be honest, we were fine with not linking significant in-game content to what specific toys its players owned—and we're fine with our games not making us spend more money to unlock native content.

Nintendo's foray into the toys-that-connect-to-games genre may have been tardy, but that hasn't gotten in the way of the Amiibo series' wild success since its November launch. The worldwide figure we last heard in December was 5.7 million figurines sold, which we assume has grown substantially since its third wave of figures in the Super Mario series launched last week.