Porchlight

Pumpkins get orange, witches get purple, monsters get green. Keep the porch light on. It is Halloween, and the kids come up the path in costumes. Their costume is their order. Tap the bowl that matches, before they lose patience. A treat given fast pays more, and right calls in a row build a streak, up to eight times. Give the wrong bowl, or keep a kid waiting too long, and they trick your house: an egg on the boards, toilet paper from the roof. Each trick breaks one of your porch light's three bulbs. The third puts the light out, and the night is over. Keep calling it right and a broken bulb comes back on. Each bowl holds eight. Tap the candy bag to duck inside and refill, but the kid on the step keeps waiting while you do. The night is the difficulty. It runs from 6 PM to midnight, and every hour brings something new. Siblings in twos and threes. Ghosts, who take any treat. Big kids with no costume, who get no candy. Masks you cannot read until they reach the step. By 11 PM nobody waits long. Reach midnight with the light still on and every bulb pays. Then the street goes quiet, and the real ones come through the gate. Every treat pays double, and nobody's light lasts long. Every night brings the same visitors in each hour, in a different order, so a best score means the same thing for everyone. The first night teaches the rule one kid at a time. One thumb, in portrait. Each bowl carries its costume's shape as well as its colour, so the colours never have to be told apart. On a keyboard, left, up and right serve and down refills; a gamepad works too. Everything plays signed out; only the leaderboard needs an account, and the game says so in plain words.