Drag a lantern onto the lawn · drop on a matching lantern to merge · drag a dark one to relight · drag grass to pan · tap edge badges · P pause
Pumpkin Patrol is a free Halloween merge defense game with a cute, colourful look. A big black cauldron full of candy sits at the end of a cobbled road, and a parade of friendly-looking monsters is walking down that road to take it. Your guards are jack-o'-lanterns. Each one sits on a grass tile and has little bats circling around it, and every bat that touches a monster gives it a bop. Drag a lantern onto the lawn next to the road and its bats hit everything that walks past.
Two lanterns of the same level merge into one: drop a Level 1 lantern on another Level 1 and you get a Level 2 with two bats, then three bats at Level 3, a wider circle at Level 4 and a golden ring of six bats at Level 5. The glow and the badge on each pumpkin show its level. Fewer, stronger lanterns hit harder, but they also leave gaps on the road, so every merge is a small choice between power and coverage.
New lanterns come from the giant pumpkins growing in the patches beside the road. Each giant pumpkin has a number on it. Bats carve that number down, and when it reaches zero the pumpkin cracks open and a fresh lantern hops onto the nearest free tile. A gold pumpkin gives you a Level 2 straight away. The best tiles touch both a pumpkin and the road, so your lanterns guard the candy and grow your army at the same time.
From the third night every lantern burns a candle. The ring around a lantern shows how much wax is left, and a lantern that burns out turns dark and its bats slow right down. Drag it to another tile, or swap it with a lantern of a different level, and it lights up again. Keeping a good layout lit is the rhythm of the later nights.
Maple Lane, the first street, fits on one screen. From Graveyard Row on the streets are bigger, up to eleven tiles wide and seventeen long, and a second road comes in from the side and joins the first before the cauldron. On a computer you still see the whole street at once. On a phone the tiles would get too small for a thumb, so the camera moves in closer instead: each night opens with a short fly-over from the entrance to your lanterns, and you drag any empty patch of grass to look around. Pulsing badges on the edge of the screen point at monsters you cannot see, with a count inside. An orange badge with an exclamation mark means a monster is about to walk in there, and a gold one means a Bone Giant. Tap a badge and the camera glides to it. Carry a lantern to the edge of the screen and the map scrolls along, so you can take it to a far corner in one drag.
The campaign has 36 nights on six streets: Maple Lane, Graveyard Row, Witchwood, Foggy Pier, Old Mill and Hollow Hill, each with its own map. Skeletons come first, then ghosts that fade so the bats pass through them, two roads at once, mummies that unravel into two little mummies, witches that fly straight over the lawn on a dotted line, gust ghosts that blow out one candle as they pass and werewolves that sprint in bursts. A Bone Giant waits at the end of every street. Keep 90 percent of the candy for three stars. If the cauldron empties you can refill it once per night with a short video, or simply try again. Nights, stars and unlocked streets are saved in your browser, and the game runs on phones and computers with nothing to install.
ArcadeWhale 
