Season 6: Halloween Night
31 October 18:00 to 1 November 18:00 UTC · Winner: The Violet Hour Coven (purple)
Halloween Night was a single 24-hour season. Four covens fought to hold the button. Every second their coven held the button it earned points, scaled by a shared lantern that the whole street kept alight by trick-or-treating. Around the button sat a street of thirteen doors, a Haunted House that opened when eight knockers gathered, coven cauldrons that turned sugar into hexes, a Trick-or-Treat Book of stamps, and a hidden cipher called the unreadable page.
The Violet Hour won by about 760 points. They took the lead around 06:00 and never lost it. Sebas made the final press at 18:00:00, with 0.4 seconds left on the clock.
At a glance
| Players signed up | 80 (69 in a coven, 11 without one) |
| Played trick-or-treat | 64 |
| Pressed the button | 62 |
| Button presses | 250 (188 of them used a Skeleton Key) |
| Door knocks | 16,518 |
| Treats handed out | 12,529 (and 3,810 tricks) |
| Light given to the lantern | 20,920 |
| Haunted House openings | 22 of a possible 23 |
| Skeleton Keys | 160 (68 from doors, 22 from the Haunted House, 70 bought with sugar) |
| Hex votes opened / hexes cast / hexes warded | 90 / 24 / 0 |
| Book stamps | 2,745, collected by 68 players |
| Full Trick-or-Treat Books | 1 (gwaer) |
| Unreadable page solved | 4 players |
| Chat messages | 4,676 across Main, the Street Log, four coven chats and Mod |
Final standings
| Coven | Points | Clock time holding the button | Presses | Members | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🥇 | The Violet Hour Coven (purple) | 5,559 | 8h 02m | 84 | 20 |
| 🥈 | The Hedgewitch Coven (green) | 4,799 | 6h 45m | 57 | 16 |
| 🥉 | The Blood Moon Coven (red) | 3,769 | 4h 56m | 64 | 17 |
| 4 | The Drowned Coven (blue) | 3,202 | 4h 15m | 45 | 13 |
First press: patrickyaa (Hedgewitch), seven seconds after the start. Last press: sebas (Violet Hour) at 18:00:00. Longest single hold: sebas, 55 minutes from 05:08. Next came ekwen at 42 minutes from 13:23, then moin at 38 minutes from 08:07.
How the lead moved (clock time held, by the hour)
| Time (UTC) | Leader | Order |
|---|---|---|
| 19:00 | Violet | Violet, Drowned, Blood Moon, Hedgewitch |
| 21:00 | Blood Moon takes over | Blood Moon, Violet, Drowned, Hedgewitch |
| 00:00 | Blood Moon | Blood Moon, Violet, Drowned, Hedgewitch |
| 03:00 | Blood Moon, well clear | Blood Moon 198 min, Hedgewitch 115 min |
| 06:00 | Violet takes over | Violet, Blood Moon, Hedgewitch, Drowned |
| 11:00 | Violet | Violet, Hedgewitch, Blood Moon, Drowned |
| 18:00 | Violet | Violet, Hedgewitch, Blood Moon, Drowned |
Blood Moon led the evening and most of the night. Their chat went quiet after about 03:00, and between 05:00 and 15:00 they held the button for only about twenty minutes. Violet’s overnight shift, mostly sebas and svc, used keys to hold long stretches through the small hours. Hedgewitch climbed steadily through the day into second.
The covens
The Violet Hour (purple), winners
The biggest coven, with 20 members, and the best organised.
- svc ran tactics, explained the rules to newcomers and welcomed every new member.
- gwaer timed the Haunted House, did the points maths and filled the whole Book.
- sebas was the top knocker (1,280 knocks, 999 treats) and top presser (14), and made the last press.
- Also: bevsdad, squirrel, dominikmoos, gerudo, ekwen, m_f (first to read the page), tastysoup, tribut, errorcode.
Their plan was to take the button only from Blood Moon, Snuff the leader, save keys for the end and trade hexes for stamps. They cast 9 hexes from only 12 votes, by far the best vote rate of any coven, and filled the biggest pot (1,275 sugar from 17 givers). Morale stayed high all night.
The Hedgewitch Coven (green), second
The comeback coven.
- macallan was second in knocks (1,201) and treats (928), pressed 13 times, and welcomed new players all day.
- demigodrick played here too, and joked about “critical green-winning” fixes.
- Also: patrickyaa (first press), cannedtuna, vatlark (two 30-minute-plus holds in the morning), almost1337, bobtimus_prime.
They were often last in the evening, then climbed steadily through the day into a clear second.
The Blood Moon Coven (red), third
Loud, theatrical and the evening’s leaders.
- comradepupivy led the cheering and the cauldron giving.
- snoopy knocked 1,106 times and led the coven’s push for stamps.
- frightfulpleasance read the standings closely.
- sneezycat worked the ciphers all day.
- tikiporch worked the overnight shift.
Every other coven aimed at them: 11 of the night’s 24 hexes struck Blood Moon. Their chat thinned out after 03:00, and they opened 34 hex votes, the most of any coven, but cast only 5.
The Drowned Coven (blue), fourth
The smallest coven, with 13 members.
- w3dd1e began the night as blue’s only member, and coached newcomers.
- Also: needanke, monkey, deebster, terrance, moin (a 39-minute hold at 08:07), its_prolly_fine, railway692.
Their cauldron problem was that votes needed three voters, and blue rarely had three awake. They opened 22 votes and cast only 4 hexes. Even so, they were hexed only once all night.
The systems
The button
There was one press per player per day, plus Skeleton Keys as bonus presses. Keys turned out to be the real currency: 188 of the 250 presses used one. Presses were busiest at the start (26 between 18:00 and 19:00) and at the end (32 between 17:00 and 18:00). Between 02:00 and 14:00 there were often fewer than ten an hour.
Trick-or-treat
There were 16,518 knocks, spread almost evenly over the twelve doors (about 1,230 to 1,310 each).
| Tier | Count | Light |
|---|---|---|
| Common | 7,280 | 4,000 |
| Uncommon | 2,918 | 4,248 |
| Rare | 1,538 | 5,563 |
| Epic (Full-Size Bar) | 535 | 4,641 |
| Legendary (King-Size Bar, Skeleton Key) | 258 | 2,468 |
| Tricks | 3,810 | 0 |
The nine tricks came up about equally often, between 390 and 461 times each. Spooky font was the most common and Ghostwriter the least.
Costumes, by number of players:
- Skeleton: 29. It was the clear favourite, and 11 of the top 12 knockers wore it.
- Pumpkinhead: 15
- Black Cat: 10
- Sheet Ghost: 8
- Mummy: 6
Top hauls
| Player | Coven | Treats | Light |
|---|---|---|---|
| sebas | Violet | 999 | 1,080 |
| macallan | Hedgewitch | 928 | 993 |
| snoopy | Blood Moon | 866 | 1,189 |
| svc | Violet | 809 | 1,126 |
| gwaer | Violet | 583 | 810 |
The lantern
The lantern ran almost full for the first four hours, between 940 and 1,000. It sank through the night to a low of 226 around 07:00. It recovered through the afternoon and finished between 790 and 910. The average was 684 and it never went out.
The Haunted House
The Haunted House opened every hour from 19:00 to 16:00, 22 times, with between 8 and 26 visitors.
Key winners:
- Twice: snoopy, bevsdad, vatlark, gwaer, demigodrick.
- Once: squirrel, dominikmoos, comradepupivy, dosdude, frightfulpleasance, drworm, railway692, sebas, tribut, tastysoup, needanke, idealotus.
The cauldron and hexes
| Coven | Votes opened | Hexes cast | Sugar into the pot | Givers | Hexes suffered |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Violet | 12 | 9 | 1,275 | 17 | 8 |
| Hedgewitch | 22 | 6 | 870 | 13 | 4 |
| Blood Moon | 34 | 5 | 631 | 13 | 11 |
| Drowned | 22 | 4 | 590 | 10 | 1 |
By type, the 24 hexes cast were 13 Snuff, 4 Fog, 4 Silence and 3 Toll.
Keys and the sweet shop
Keys came from three places: 68 from the doors (No. 13), 22 from the Haunted House draw, and 70 bought with sugar. Each player’s first key cost 300 sugar, and each one after cost 100 more.
The biggest buyers were macallan and sebas (5 each), then svc, gwaer and frightfulpleasance (4 each).
The Trick-or-Treat Book
- 68 players collected 2,745 stamps of 61 kinds.
- gwaer filled every page, the only full Book of the season.
- svc and sneezycat each finished with 60 stamps.
- Late in the day, covens arranged to hex each other so both sides could earn the hex stamps.
The unreadable page (the ARG)
The page came in three parts, revealed at 18:00, 02:00 and 10:00. An opening clue linked to a video, and each part sat under its own chain of ciphers with a key from the same theme.
| Order | Player | Coven | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | m_f | Violet | 10:56 |
| 2 | gwaer | Violet | 16:48 |
| 3 | svc | Violet | 16:52 |
| 4 | sebas | Violet | 17:58 |
All four solvers were from the winning coven.
If you want to know what the answers were to the puzzle, I’ve put them in the spoiler below
spoiler
How it’s set up
An opening clue sits above part 1. It’s shown once the night begins. Part 1 appears at the start of the night, part 2 a third of the way through, and part 3 at two thirds. The answer box only opens in the final third.
Opening clue
The visible hint is “pick a coven”. The text under it is encrypted with the key word Hedgewitch. Undo the base64, then undo the Vigenère cipher with “Hedgewitch”. It reads: “Looking for a puzzle clue? / Try this video:” and links a YouTube video (0tdyU_gW6WE).
Part 1, “she keeps a candle” (key “bustin”; undo these in order)
base64 reverse the string base32 Vigenère with “bustin”
Part 2, “for the one who” (key “stay-puft”)
base64 Atbash ROT47 read as hex XOR the bytes with “stay-puft”
Part 3, “never knocks” (key “ghostbusters”)
read as hex ROT13 base64, which gives a string of digits read the digits as Morse: 1 is a dot, 0 is a dash, 2 is a gap between letters, 3 is a gap between words Vigenère with “ghostbusters”
Answer: “she keeps a candle for the one who never knocks”
All those clues were part of the youtube video.
More numbers
Holding the button
- Average hold: 5 min 46 s. Median: 2 min 37 s.
- 86 holds (a third of all presses) lasted under a minute. 30 holds lasted a quarter of an hour or more.
- Busiest minute: the last one, with eleven presses.
The street
| Busiest hour for knocks | 22:00 on Halloween, 1,031 knocks from 28 players |
| Close second | 17:00 on the final day, 1,020 knocks from 29 players |
| Quietest hour | 05:00, 363 knocks from 10 players |
| Night owls | 23 players knocked between 03:00 and 07:00 |
| Haunted House visits | 340, by 50 different players |
| Most Haunted House visits | svc 17, snoopy and macallan 16, bevsdad 15 |
| Most King-Size Bars | svc 12, macallan 10, frightfulpleasance 8 |
| Most tricked | sebas 281, macallan 275, snoopy 244 |
Costumes, door by door
| Costume | Knocks | Tricks | Light per treat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Skeleton | 11,933 | 23.6% | 1.56 |
| Pumpkinhead | 1,830 | 22.8% | 1.95 |
| Sheet Ghost | 1,217 | 22.6% | 2.05 |
| Mummy | 1,091 | 22.9% | 1.99 |
| Black Cat | 176 | 27.8% | 2.98 |
The Skeleton’s speed won out over the others’ bigger treats: it earned the least light per treat but knocked far more often. The Black Cat earned the most per treat but was hardly played, and was tricked most often.
Sugar
| Sugar | |
|---|---|
| Spent on Skeleton Keys (70 keys, 30 buyers) | 27,600 |
| Given to coven cauldrons | 3,366 |
| Given to wards | 125 |
| Still in bags at the end | 10,895 |
| Total earned | about 42,000 |
Two thirds of all sugar went on keys. The cauldrons got less than a tenth.
The Book
- Most common stamp: holding the button (62 players), then knocking at the first door (60).
- Rarest stamps: reading the unreadable page (4), a hex warded (10), and the four stamps for hearing the button speak (21 to 25 each).
Where players came from
Players came from 34 different instances. The most were from lemmy.world (15), lemmy.zip (8) and feddit.org (6), then piefed.social (4) and sopuli.xyz, lemmy.ca and piefed.zip (3 each).
Reactions
Chat received 1,505 reactions. The favourites were 🎉 (174), 😂 (135), 🐦⬛ (132, the raven chant), 👍 (129), ❤️ (117) and 👀 (108).
The community
- Chat: 1,817 player messages in Main from 45 players. Violet’s coven chat was the busiest (678 messages from 13 players), then Blood Moon (493), Hedgewitch (241) and Drowned (184).
- Most talkative: w3dd1e (370), snoopy (366), svc (313), comradepupivy (289), gwaer (271).
- Mood: warm and silly all night, with almost no real conflict.
Running jokes:
- Cat meows from the trick and the Silence hex.
- comradepupivy’s HOA presidency.
- The button growing hungrier for brains.
- The “CAW” raven chant that w3dd1e and dosdude ran from 23:00 to the end.
- Pop-up ads mocking each instance.
- A rock-paper-scissors match between skankhunt42 and svc “after 2031 draws”.
Other awards:
- Rock-paper-scissors champion: bevsdad, with 6 wins.
- Top referrer: macallan, with 3.
Conclusion
Hope you all enjoyed S6! It was a mini-season, with lots of new things added and improvements to various bits and pieces. I kept it short because Halloween is only a day, and I also didn’t feel the mechanics were there to support it much longer than that.
It would be great now that we’re a couple of seasons in, if you could let me know the bits you’ve enjoyed from each season, what worked well and what you’d like to see come back. Designing these without spoilers is hard, and it sits in a bubble of trying to second guess every decision, rework mechanics based on what I assume people wouldn’t like etc. I really thought people would hate the fishing for example, and yet that seemed to be quite popular. So any and all feedback is massively appreciated.
A couple more things - myself and the mods can’t influence a live game in any way. The mods especially have no powers above moderating player behavior, and for fairness the game mechanics themselves apply to us all equally. Just want to make that super clear!
Please don’t use scripts. We caught a few people doing it, and it’s against the ethos of the game.
This was the playlist if you want to see the songs included.
Finally, a thank you again to everyone who came along and played. It really is always so fun playing with you all!
Thanks
Demigodrick
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