Free Halloween games to play online with friends

Google’s Halloween games, all still playable

Every year Google puts a Halloween Doodle on its homepage, and several of them are full games that never went away. We loaded each of these on 4 October 2026.

Magic Cat Academy stars Momo, a black cat at a school of magic, and it plays well with a mouse or a trackpad. The PAC-MAN Doodle was made with Bandai Namco for the game’s 45th birthday, with each haunted maze built around one of the four ghosts.

How to host The Great Ghoul Duel for your friends

The Great Ghoul Duel was Google’s first multiplayer Doodle. Matches last two minutes, and the 2022 version added new maps, power-ups and hats to earn.

1. Open the 2022 Doodle page and press play.
2. Choose Host Game. It asks whether to create a private match and gives you an invite link.
3. Send the link to up to seven friends. The lobby counts players as they arrive, up to 8.
4. Start once everyone is in. Teams are four against four.

Two tips. Public matchmaking is slow outside Halloween week, so a private link is the reliable way to get a game. And if the game doesn’t appear on the Doodle page, players have shared a direct link to the game that loads it on its own.

Drawing games with a Halloween twist

Drawing games are the easiest group game there is: everyone opens a link, and nobody needs to be good at anything.

• skribbl.io: create a private room for 2 to 20 players, paste words into the “Custom words” box and tick “Use custom words only”. Then every round is Halloween.
• Gartic Phone: the telephone game with drawings. Its lobby has a “Gartictober” preset this month, built around a drawing word for each of October’s 31 days.

Here’s a word list to paste into skribbl.io. It mixes easy and hard words, so rounds don’t all go the same way:

pumpkin, ghost, witch, broomstick, black cat, haunted house, vampire, werewolf, zombie, mummy, skeleton, spider web, candy corn, trick or treat, jack-o’-lantern, cauldron, graveyard, full moon, bat, scarecrow, Frankenstein, costume, potion, coffin, owl, haunted mirror, headless horseman, crystal ball, candle, fog machine

A zombie night on any website

Tabzooka is our Chrome extension, and its Web Invasion mode is the closest thing to a haunted house you can play on a web page. Creatures tear themselves out of the page’s own headlines and images, in waves that get harder each time:

• Office Zombies get back up once after you kill them, unless you burn them or blow them apart.
• Tab Ghosts float straight through walls and teleport next to you.
• Skeleton Archers keep their distance and lob arcing arrows.
• Byte Bats dive-bomb in swarms, and Bomb Imps run at you and explode.

Every third wave is a boss. The Bone Lich, in the picture above, fires homing skulls, raises zombies out of the page, teleports and hides behind a bone shield. Later you meet The Butcher with his meat hook, and the Horned Demon, who rains fire and opens fire-gate portals.

Playing it together

Up to 6 people can fight the same page in co-op, each on their own computer with their own hero. More players bring more and tougher creatures, and health never refills by itself, so the team shares the heart that drops after each wave.

Web Invasion is a Pro mode, but only the host needs Pro. When someone starts a mode in a same-Wi-Fi game, the whole room plays it, including friends on the free version. Same-Wi-Fi games need no codes: one person clicks Host on this Wi-Fi and everyone else clicks Join. Our same-Wi-Fi guide walks through it.

Tips for surviving the undead

• Burn zombies or blow them up, so they stay down. Zook’s Cluster Grenades are free; Merlo’s Fire Staff works too.
• Kill the archers first. They chip away at you from range while you fight everything else.
• Save your Special for the boss wave, and stand on something high when the Lich starts raising zombies.
• If you don’t want to wreck a real site, play on the dark Server Farm arena. It looks the part.

More Halloween picks

• Shell Shockers is a free browser shooter where everyone is an egg. Its October updates bring back the Halloween skins and maps; the 2025 one, “Night of the Living Egg”, added a spooky map called Creak. Make a private game and share the code to play with friends.
• Destroy Any Website, the viral game from September, has an optional $4.99 Halloween Skin Pack. The game itself is free. See our Destroy Any Website guide.

A Halloween game night, planned for you

1. Warm up with The Great Ghoul Duel: host a private match, share the link and play a few two-minute rounds.
2. Switch to skribbl.io with the word list above while people grab snacks.
3. Main event: co-op Web Invasion in Tabzooka. See how far the group gets before the Bone Lich.
4. Wind down with PAC-MAN: Halloween 2025 Edition, and compare high scores.

Everyone needs a computer with Chrome for Tabzooka, because Chrome extensions don’t run on phones. The Google games and the drawing games work on almost anything. You can add Tabzooka to Chrome here; two heroes, Free Play, Target Rush and same-Wi-Fi multiplayer are free.

Questions people ask

Keep reading

• Games to Play When Bored at School or on a Computer (2026)
• Browser Games to Play With Friends Online, Free (2026)
• Browser Games With Friends on the Same Wi-Fi (No Codes)