Task four on the office hunt is a Deepavali trivia question. Every team walks over to the same colleague, the one person on the floor who celebrates, and asks her. By the third team she has stopped smiling. She is now the festival's help desk, and she didn't sign up for it.
Singapore's Deepavali public holiday is Sunday 8 November 2026, with Monday 9 November off in lieu; Malaysia follows the same moon, so check your state's gazette before you print anything. Deepavali is lights, kolam, and family evenings. It's a different festival from the September lantern trail, and the hunt should look like it. It should also not turn anyone into the help desk. Nobody performs their festival for points.
Here's the version to build. You write a few chapters in a web editor, each holding a handful of tasks: festival lighting to photograph, a QR where a shop has said yes, one check-off, one written question. Players scan a QR code at the MRT and play in their phone's browser, with nothing to install. One volunteer sits with a dashboard on café wifi, approves the edge-case photos, messages teams, and ends the game. Up to 25 phones at once is free, with a small watermark; paid plans raise that number and change nothing else. That's PlayTours, and pricing is here. If someone in Malaysia asks whether this is HRD Corp claimable: only inside a registered provider's approved programme, as the Merdeka post explains. A lights walk on its own isn't a grant.
Tell the photo checker what you mean
Photo tasks are the heart of this hunt. The team reads an instruction, takes the picture, and PlayTours checks it and awards the points. The instruction is what you write, so write it tightly: "festival lighting or kolam on the street or building you're standing at, not a phone wallpaper, not a screenshot, not a person in costume." Keep the volunteer on the dashboard to approve the edge cases by hand.
Don't use a religious image as a "find this" target. If the thing you'd photograph is sacred, it isn't a point-scoring task. Dress-up tasks and anything that ranks how people observe the festival stay out too.
The public-eve route, with a 9 p.m. stop
Evenings of 6 to 8 November: Little India in Singapore, Brickfields and the Little India stretches in Malaysia.
Chapter one, in order, at the MRT or a CC: safety, a line that stewards and police override the app, and one check-off task to find the first-aid point. Chapter two: photo tasks for lights, an optional shared photo for a community gallery, and one QR code only where a shop has signed off, because those shopfronts are businesses, not set dressing. Chapter three: "hunt closed, enjoy the street."
Every task can be given a clock time after which it disappears from players' screens. Set the outdoor tasks to vanish at 9 p.m. The game's countdown can't be paused, so if you need to stop early, end the game from the dashboard.
Deepavali eve in Little India is a packed pedestrian zone. Let the middle chapters shuffle, turn on crowd prevention so teams spread out, and put the join QR at the MRT where data still works. Skip location tasks in the thickest stretch; they fail there.
The Monday office version
Sixty minutes, indoors, with lights you bought, and everything optional because people have family obligations the same weekend.
A check-off task to find someone celebrating this week and ask what they're eating. A photo of the pantry lights you actually put up. A matching-pairs task, festival to country, checked by a colleague who observes it and has agreed to check it. One multiple-choice fact you've verified yourself. Then a written-answer task: "what we got wrong last year about including people this week." Each team types a paragraph, saved against their name; download it afterwards and keep its points off the leaderboard.
If the office is mixed, skip the trivia entirely. Ask people to notice the office as it actually is this week: extra sweets, a kolam at reception, colleagues who are out.
Use Tamil, English, or Malay as the workplace needs, one source language per riddle, with translation on. If a school run involves photos of children, you need the school's photo policy first. Send your draft task list to me at hello@playtours.app and I'll tell you which ones should be optional.
-Mo
If you're building this in PlayTours
AI-judged photo tasks with a tight briefing; judged-image (human) as the fallback; time-restricted tasks for the 9 p.m. cutoff; Image share for the gallery; a judged-text task with points hidden from the leaderboard; Shuffle chapters and Prevent bunching for the street route; Instant Join posters at the edge of the zone, none in the middle.