Seasonal games

Seasonal games

A seasonal game is a normal game wearing a costume. That sounds dismissive and it is meant as the opposite: once you know which mechanic is under the costume, you know whether the title is worth opening in a month that has nothing to do with pumpkins or snow. This set holds nine of them, and this page is mostly an attempt to look under all nine.

We judged the theming from the screen rather than from the title. A game qualifies if the artwork, the characters and the sound are dressed for a season — not because the word "Halloween" appears in its name.

Five pumpkins and four snowmen

The split is five to four, Halloween ahead of Christmas. That imbalance is the catalogue's, not a preference of ours, and the sets stay honest about what exists rather than padding one half to make a tidy number.

The Halloween five, in order of how dark they actually are

Halloween Match 3 is the mildest thing here. Thirty-six tiles of cartoon faces — a green square-headed monster, a one-eyed mummy, a blue ghost, a black-haired vampire — with a single orange pumpkin sitting among them as the special tile, and a purple laboratory behind the board holding an eyeball in a jar and a potion bottle. A row across the top counts SCORE, TIME and BEST SCORE, and the time reads 20 when a board starts.

Happy Halloween is a memory board of twenty-four identical pumpkin faces laid out six by four against black branches, with a left-hand rail of small round pills: a clock, a trophy showing 0 of 12, a refresh charge and a medal. Nothing on that screen is frightening; it is orange.

Halloween Memory dresses the same idea more thickly. Big cards with pink bat-print backs, and behind them a jack-o'-lantern the size of the whole screen. What we turned over was a witch girl carrying a broom and a bucket shaped like a skull, and a bundle of banknotes with a face on it — the mix is comic rather than macabre.

Halloween Bubble Shooter hides its costume in the details: skulls inside some bubbles, cauldrons standing along the bottom edge, and a coffin-shaped panel that slides up at the end of a round with a skull on it and the word muahaha written next to your score. The joke is louder than the fright.

Scary Run is the one worth flagging. The sky is orange-red with alien planets hanging in it, the ground is bare rock, the runner is a skeleton, and a small green zombie waits along the way. It is drawn as a cartoon and there is no blood in it, but the palette and the subject are a step past the other four, so if you are handing a screen to somebody who dislikes being startled, start elsewhere.

The Christmas four

Christmas Balloons puts an igloo and a pile of wrapped presents on a snowfield and floats smiling balloons in Santa hats past you; one of ours burst into a green splash. Along the bottom sits a legend of balloon colours with a value written beside each — some are worth 1, some 0 — which is the entire strategy of the game printed on the screen.

Christmas Match 3 is a different machine from the Halloween matcher despite the shared genre: bells, teddy bears, snowmen, candy canes and elves on a snowy cliff, with BLOCK, MOVES and LEVEL counters down the right side, a blue column that drains at the left, and a clock at the bottom that counts upward rather than down.

Christmas Panda Run runs a snow forest past a yellow-and-pink church, a snowman and a candy cane, with four hearts, a cookie counter, a level number, a clock and a distance readout in metres all sharing the top bar, and two arrow buttons in the bottom corners.

Santa Run gives Santa a sack and a gingerbread man to get past, three Santa portraits for lives in the corner, and a progress bar shaped like a candy cane along the top. Purple night sky, snow-capped mountains, pine trees.

What the paint is hiding, for anyone reading this in June

Under the costumes there are four ordinary machines: two matching boards, two memory boards, two side-scrolling runners, one bubble shooter, one score-tapping game. A matching board is still a matching board in the middle of the year, and the pair of matchers here behave differently enough — one gives you a twenty-second clock, the other gives you moves and a level — that picking between them is a real choice rather than a seasonal one.

The runners are the least season-dependent of all: Santa Run and Christmas Panda Run play like any other endless runner with the snow turned up. If you want that machine without the tinsel, the one-thumb set is full of it.

Questions about seasons and machines

How many titles wear a season here?

Nine seasonal games, split five and four. Every one of them was opened before it went in.

Are there Lunar New Year or Songkran themes in here?

No. The catalogue currently runs to Halloween and Christmas and nothing else, so this set does the same. We would rather say that plainly than imply a breadth the library does not have.

Which of these suit someone who dislikes being frightened?

The two Halloween memory boards and the matching board — cartoon faces, bright colours, no jump scares. Avoid Scary Run. If the opposite is true and you want the genuinely dark end of the library, that lives on the horror shelf.