Spooky Shortcuts: free Halloween game to chain keyboard shortcuts

What is Spooky Shortcuts?

Ten ghosts haunt Zip's laptop, and each one is a small task: copy a whole letter into another doc, move a word to the top, undo twice then redo. Chain 2 to 4 keyboard shortcuts in the right order to banish it before the candle burns out. Windows, Linux and Mac keys.

Spooky Shortcuts is a free Halloween game about keyboard shortcuts. Ten ghosts haunt a laptop, and each one is a small task: copy a whole letter into a new doc and save it, move a word to the very top, undo two edits and redo one. Chain the right shortcuts in the right order to banish it before the candle burns out.

Play with a real keyboard or tap the key buttons on a phone. Windows and Linux players see Ctrl, Mac players see ⌘, and the game switches by itself if you press the other system's keys. Ghosts start with 2-step chains and end with 4-step ones.

At a glance

Category

Seasonal

Difficulty

Medium

Play time

2–4 min

Price

Free, in your browser, sign-up optional

How to play

Read the task

Each ghost is a small job on the haunted laptop that takes 2 to 4 shortcuts.

Chain the keys

Press the shortcuts in order on your keyboard, or tap the key buttons one after another. Ctrl on Windows and Linux, ⌘ on Mac.

Mind the candle

Each ghost has its own candle. A wrong shortcut shows the right one and costs a life, one per ghost at most. 3 lives.

Score

25 points per right step. A ghost banished with no slip adds 100, ×2 after 3 clean ghosts in a row and ×3 after 6, plus up to 50 for speed.

Scoring

Each right step of a chain scores 25 points. A ghost banished with no slip adds 100, ×2 after 3 clean ghosts in a row and ×3 after 6, plus up to 50 for time left.

A wrong shortcut or a burned-out candle costs one of your 3 lives, at most one per ghost. 10 ghosts per run. Your best score is kept in this browser.

What it trains

Chaining shortcuts

Planning a task as a sequence: select, copy, jump, paste, save.

Keyboard fluency

The everyday editing shortcuts on Windows, Linux and Mac.

Working without the mouse

Moving, styling and fixing text in a few key presses.

Strategy and tips

Select first

Bold, italic, links, cut and copy all work on what's selected. Selecting is usually step one.

Cut moves, copy clones

Cut + paste moves text. Copy + paste leaves a twin behind.

Jump, don't scroll

Ctrl+Home and Ctrl+End (⌘↑ and ⌘↓ on Mac) take you to the very start or end.

Shift paste is plain

Adding Shift to paste drops the fonts and colours of what you copied, in Google Docs and many other apps.

Undo has a partner

Redo is Ctrl+Y on Windows and ⌘⇧Z on Mac. It brings back what you just undid.

Why play Spooky Shortcuts?

One shortcut saves a second. A chain of them turns a fiddly mouse job into a quick reflex: select, copy, jump, paste, save. Practising whole chains, not single keys, is what makes shortcuts stick in everyday work.

Frequently asked questions