Mid-Autumn Festival falls on Friday, 25 September 2026. In Singapore and Malaysia that means lanterns, mooncakes, and family evenings, and because it is not a public holiday the way Chinese New Year is, a short hunt the same night still works for an office, a community club, or a campus.
Players scan a QR at the CC gate so a page opens on the phone they already have, with nothing to install, and up to 25 phones at once is free with a small watermark, which is enough to test with your organizing committee before you pay for a bigger night. A night market can look like thousands of people, but you might only have 60 hunters, so size for the phones that will actually join.
The useful split is an office hunt of about 45 minutes or a neighborhood trail after dark.
For the office version, hang ten paper lanterns on two floors, each with a QR code, and if you only have those ten lanterns for more than ten teams, you can limit how many times each lantern task can be completed in the session so the first teams through do not leave the rest staring at an empty hook. Add a written answer such as “who are you eating with tonight?”, and if people will not stay past six, run it Friday afternoon indoors with lanterns you actually bought so they can still go home on time.
For the neighborhood version, Thursday 24 or Friday 25 after 7 p.m. is when the lanterns are actually the point. Start at a CC or school gate rather than the busiest lantern street, put the safety line in the first chapter so lanterns stay on sticks and out of roads, and for “meet a neighbor” you can require that the task is completed with one other team so they share the same submission instead of ticking a box alone. Walk three lantern stops yourself the night before, then send people home, and hide the outdoor tasks after 9:30 p.m. so the list empties. Once the game timer starts it cannot be paused, stopped or adjusted, so if you need to finish early you stop the session from the dashboard.
Photo must be similar to an image you uploaded
A task that only says “photo of a lantern” will pass a phone wallpaper or a car headlight, because both are round and they glow. If you have hung lanterns of your own design, photograph one and upload it to the task so players have to submit a photo similar to that image, which is the stricter check when “any round light” would otherwise pass. You can also require that the photo contain a lantern as the object you specify. Someone on the dashboard can still mark the awkward ones by hand if you leave judged photos on as a fallback.
Photo frames, stickers, and blurred faces
If you want a gallery during the hunt, Image share marks the photo correct and shows it to everyone in the session, and you can enable photo frames and stickers so teams pick a lantern overlay rather than posting a raw snapshot. For a CC night with families, you can automatically blur detected faces on-device, with the caveat that PlayTours cannot guarantee every face in every photo will be blurred.
Ask a stall before taping a QR to it. If a task involves sharing mooncake, make it optional and mention allergies in the briefing, because some fillings contain nuts and some contain pork. Leave out anything that makes light of offerings, and do not make “buy from this stall” the only right answer unless the stall sponsored you and you have said so.
If you would like a second look at your lantern reference photos, send them to hello@playtours.app by 18 September.