Manual · Extras

Halloween

In October PiggyTask gets spooky: a ghost hunt in stages with three games, a pumpkin workshop without a timer and a shop that is only open this month.

A ghost hunt in stages

Halloween in October — a ghost hunt in stages: tap the spooky creatures, avoid the sweets. Play daily; a new stage unlocks every second day (1, 3, 5 … 31 October) — 16 stages for the month's 16 odd days. 31 October carries two rewards: the last stage plus the date-bound bonus that does not depend on progress. Win twice that day and you get both; the bonus does not use up the day.

The cadence is a ceiling, not a deadline: miss days and you catch up on the following ones (one a day), and even a whole week missed still fits before the month is out. On days without a new stage, playing still pays — the bonus challenge counts as usual. Only one won round a day counts either way. Once every stage is done the games stay playable but stop paying out — the bonus waits until 31 October.

Progress shows as a spooky street above the game: at first a black alley of silhouettes, and every stage completed wakes one prop — pumpkin, grave, lantern, coffin — until the haunted castle at the end lights up on 31 October.

Three games, a different special rule every day

Which game it is, the child picks: ghost hunt, ghost sequence (watch a sequence, then repeat it) or pumpkin memory (turn cards over and find the pairs).

So that two weeks of daily play don't feel the same, every day has its own special rule, named after a spooky night — full moon, fog, pumpkin rain, ghost hour, spider time, or "trick or treat", where the sweets are the target for once. Each game has its own version of it: the same foggy night means drifting fog in the ghost hunt, while in memory two cards swap places after every wrong guess. 1 October is the classic hunt with no extras, and a plain day comes round again every seven days — the exception shouldn't become the rule.

On top of that there's an optional bonus challenge (say, "hit a 5x combo") worth an extra magic coin. Special rule and challenge follow the date, so they're the same for every child in a family. When the challenge asks for bosses, the ghost hunt guarantees one more than needed, all in the first half of the round.

Before a round starts, each of the three games shows a start screen with the rules as pictures — ticked what's right, crossed out what to leave alone. In the ghost hunt that's the creatures and sweets (the other way round on "trick or treat") plus the bosses that count double; in the ghost sequence an example of repeating forwards or — on "trick or treat" — backwards; in memory the pairs. Only then do the clock, the playback or the preview start. During play the key rule stays small on screen: the legend in the ghost hunt (a wrong tap makes the "avoid" side flash), a clear "⬅️ backwards" in the ghost sequence, and on "trick or treat" in memory a pair chart showing which sweet belongs to which creature.

All three add a choice between normal and hard before the start — hard asks for one more step, one more pair or three more points, shows more tiles and allows fewer mistakes. Supply rises with it, so hard stays winnable.

The helper

Lose a round and the event offers a helper: the child's own avatar joins in and can step in every ten seconds — in the ghost hunt it sweeps the sweets away and holds the creatures still, in the ghost sequence it shows the next step, in memory it briefly turns a matching pair over. Once switched on it stays available in every game until the next round is won — then it goes away again, because it is no longer needed. The price: a round played with the helper pays no bonus magic coin — the stage still counts, which is the whole point of it.

The leaderboard

Each of the three games has its own family leaderboard, reached via the “Leaderboard” button on the event's start screen. What counts is not the raw score: every game ends exactly when the day's target is reached, and that target grows with the stage. Instead it scores how a round was won — long streak, few misses, special targets, each measured against the child's own target for the day, and one and a half times as much on “hard”. That makes a round on stage 3 comparable to one on stage 15, so the younger sibling stands a real chance.

Every won round counts, including repeats and free play after the last stage — only rounds with the helper stay out. The season's best value is kept; come next October everyone starts at zero again.

Achievements and the pumpkin lantern

Winning a game on hard without the helper earns its own achievement — one per game. All three together unlock the pumpkin lantern, an inventory item you cannot get anywhere else: light it and the dashboard turns spooky-dark for a minute, with flickering light and bats. The lantern stays in the inventory for good and can be lit at most once an hour.

The pumpkin workshop

The calm game next to the night games: no timer, no score, no way to lose. The child picks one of three pumpkins from the patch (mixed differently each day and for each child; the colour can also be chosen), cuts the lid off by tracing around the stem with a finger, scoops out the seeds and then carves eyes, nose and mouth — freehand or with ready-made shapes. There are pens for painting, something to sit on top (witch's hat, bow, leaves, spider, bat) and finally the candle colour, from classic candle glow through red, green, purple and blue to rainbow — before lighting, it already shimmers through the holes as a preview.

Once lit, the pumpkin moves onto the pumpkin steps in front of the door, which have twelve spots; when they are full, the child picks which old pumpkin makes room. “Use as decoration now” brings a pumpkin from the steps into the child's own profile: the app jumps to the dashboard and a short hint explains the rest. The pumpkin can be dragged anywhere in the profile area — even over or between the tasks — and tapped to make it bigger or smaller. It stays there while Halloween runs and comes back for the next Halloween season.

The workshop does not open stages — those belong to the night games — but it has its own milestones by carving days: one magic coin each on the third and sixth day (within your magic-coin limit), a pumpkin taler (an extra Halloween coin for the shop) on the ninth, and the title “Pumpkin Artist” on the twelfth. How many pumpkins a child may start per day is set in the season settings (default: one; “unlimited games” on the profile lifts it). A pumpkin counts as started once the lid is off, and it stays on the workbench even after a restart.

The Halloween shop

New for 2026 is the Halloween shop, a counter that only opens in October. It sells things no stage hands out, in exchange for magic coins:

• the candle crown — three dripping candles that really flicker, the only headpiece in the game that glows
• a bat tattoo and a garlic necklace — the first Halloween pieces for the body and neck slots, fitting, with a vampire around
• the cauldron cart — a witch's cauldron on iron wheels, the avatar sitting in the bubbling green brew; the second Halloween vehicle next to the pumpkin cart from stage 14
• the pumpkin glow gradient — midnight purple running through embers into candle yellow; buy it once and every animal can wear it
• the titles "Moonlight hunter" and "Night wizard", a graveyard-fence frame, a pumpkin coin symbol for the dashboard, a chocolate spider for feeding and the spooky goggles
• the spectral eyes — the counterpart to the jack-o'-lantern eyes you get at stage 5: two pairs of eyes in five colours each, giving your avatar either a carved lantern face or an empty, burning ghost socket

There are also the vampire and skeleton transformations alongside the pumpkin head and mummy from stages 7 and 10, two avatar effects — drifting fog and a bat swarm, which recolour the whole dashboard rather than just the avatar —, the pumpkin field as a third Halloween scene, and three more snacks: caramel apple, pumpkin muffin and spider cookie.

New as well are the first three pets that are not in the year-round shop: a little broom as the last stage's reward, hovering in the air beside your avatar, plus a jack-o'-lantern in the shop that hops along next to it and a skull with a green will-o'-the-wisp for anyone who finds those two too cute.

The ghost from stage 15 finally gets decorations of its own: rattling chains, a grave candle and a patched sheet. Those only show up in the shop once the ghost has been unlocked — decorations without a ghost could not be worn — and a prompt points them out the moment it is. Independently of the event it also gets a bow, a scarf and a flower for magic coins.

Items for the inventory

The opening piece is the trick-or-treat bag: use one and five sweets hide themselves on the dashboard. Find them all and it is a coin flip — a treat or a trick: on a trick your avatar feels visibly queasy for a while. A treat is usually one magic coin, sometimes a random consumable from the Halloween range, and very rarely three coins at once. On average the bag pays out less than it costs, so no one can mint coins with it.

There is also:

• the invisibility potion — the avatar turns almost see-through until midnight; tapping it offers “Become visible” or “Open avatar”
• the spook alarm — ghosts and bats sweep across the whole dashboard
• the witch's cauldron — stir it three times in a circle and the brew turns blue, orange, red; drinking it makes the avatar speck-sized or colossal for a minute
• the curse toss — with it a child puts a spooky curse on a sibling's avatar: cobwebs, a thunder night or a zombie horde, from a fixed set; each one takes over the whole avatar stage. With no sibling in the family you curse yourself. The child on the receiving end shakes it off with a single tap at any time, and it wears off by midnight anyway.

All of it is bought in the shop and used from the normal inventory.

Halloween coins

Stages 2, 6 and 13 each pay out one Halloween coin and point straight at the shop. It works like the token from the super-level shop: one coin buys any piece on display, whatever its price tag says. That puts even the priciest transformation within reach without saving up all October — but only three pieces. Everything else still costs magic coins, and the whole range costs far more than the event pays out: it is meant to be a choice, not a checklist. The shop closes again on 1 November, and unspent Halloween coins expire with the event.

31 October

31 October is the finale: the reward screen is covered in cobwebs that have to be swept away with a broom first — until then nothing of it is visible. After that every unlock is tappable and explains itself: what it is, where to find it, and a button that takes you straight there. Anyone who has finished the event then finds their own dashboard webbed up as well — sweep it clear once and it is gone.

How to switch Halloween on or off and who can join in is covered in Events and seasonal calendars.

Quick answers