It's 9:50 on a Friday night and there are still two teams somewhere in the estate looking for "one more lantern." A parent has texted the organiser twice. Meanwhile the leaderboard shows a team that scored full points on the lantern task with a photo of a car headlight, because the task said "photo of a lantern" and, well, it was round and it glowed.
The fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month lands on Friday 25 September 2026. In Singapore and Malaysia that means lanterns, mooncakes, and family evenings. It isn't a gazetted public holiday the way Chinese New Year is, which is why HR remembers it late, builds it fast, and ends up with the evening above. Both problems have a setting.
Here's the version to build. You spend an evening in a web editor writing three chapters, each holding a handful of tasks: a lantern to photograph, a code on a stall, a matching-pairs puzzle. Players scan a QR code at the CC gate and play in their phone's browser, with nothing to install. One person sits at a café table with a dashboard, 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. A night market looks like thousands of people, but you might have 60 hunters, so size for the hunters.
Thursday 24 or Friday 25 after 7 p.m. for families and grassroots groups; once it's dark, the lanterns are the point. Friday afternoon for an office that won't keep people past six: shorter, indoors, with lanterns you actually bought.
Every task can be given a clock time after which it disappears from players' screens. For a neighbourhood trail, set the outdoor tasks to vanish at 9:30 p.m. The task list empties, the parents stop texting, and nobody's wandering the estate at ten. The game's countdown timer is the blunter tool; it can't be paused, so if you need to stop early, end the game from the dashboard.
"Photo of a lantern" will pass a phone wallpaper. Be specific, or don't use the task.
There are two ways to check a lantern photo. The first is an instruction the AI reads. The team sees "a handheld or hung festive lantern in the physical space, not on a screen, not a shop lightbox," takes the picture, and PlayTours checks it and awards the points. The wording is the whole task.
The second is a reference photo. If you've hung ten lanterns of your own design, photograph one and upload it to the task. Players then have to find and photograph a lantern that matches yours. This is stricter, and it's what you want when "any round light" would otherwise pass car headlights.
Either way, keep a person on the dashboard with café wifi who can approve the edge cases by hand. And if the organisers want pictures afterwards, add a shared-photo task: every team's photo appears in a feed the other teams can see during the hunt, which is half the fun on a lantern night, and you have a gallery at the end without chasing anyone.
A 45-minute office version. Hang ten paper lanterns on two floors, each with a QR code. Add one matching-pairs task (festival to date, checked by you) and one written answer: "who are you eating with tonight?" Then let people go home.
A neighbourhood route. Start at a CC or a school gate, not the densest lantern street. Chapter one, in order: welcome, a safety line that lanterns stay on sticks and out of roads, and one check-off task to meet a neighbour. Chapter two: three lantern stops you walked yourself the night before, on the same telco as your players. Chapter three: an optional shared photo, then "go home." Hide everything after 21:30.
Chinatown on the 25th is crowded enough that you should let the middle chapters shuffle and turn on crowd prevention, so teams spread out instead of piling into one alley. Put the join QR at the MRT exit that still has signal. Skip location tasks in packed streets; here's why.
Ask a stall before taping a QR to it. If a task involves sharing mooncake, make it optional and mention allergies in the briefing; some fillings contain nuts and some contain pork. Leave out anything that makes light of offerings, and don't make "buy from this stall" the only right answer unless the stall sponsored you and you've said so.
Write the source text in English or Chinese, not both in one riddle, and turn on translation for the rest. If you'd like a second look at your photo list, send it to me at hello@playtours.app by 18 September.
-Mo
Time-restricted tasks for the 9:30 cutoff; AI-judged photo tasks with a tight briefing; object-recognition or image-similarity tasks with your reference photo; Image share for the gallery; judged-image (human) as a fallback; Shuffle chapters and Prevent bunching for the street route; Default language and Allow translation.
Email us at hello@playtours.app
