Manx Wire · Games

Catch the Lucky Piggy

The Arkan Sonney

All games

Silver coins0

Streak–

Hearts♥♥♥

Time1:00

Press Start, then watch the glen for a rustle.

Keyboard←↑→↓ or WASD MoveSpace / Enter CatchP / Esc PauseMouse: point and click

Tap the lucky piggy while it trots in the open. Leave the hedgehogs and hares alone.

How to play

Quick hands, kind heart.

Watch for a rustle. A shaking bush, stone or tree means something is about to pop out.
Catch the piggy in the open. Tap or click it while it trots between hiding places, or steer the net with the arrow keys and press Space. Each catch earns a silver coin.
Leave the others be. Tapping a hedgehog or a hare costs a heart in Standard. In Gentle there is no penalty.
Keep a streak. Three catches in a row doubles your coins; six in a row trebles them. A miss, or letting the piggy get away, starts the streak again.
Be quick. The piggy speeds up as you score, and the round lasts one minute.

P or Escape pauses, and so does switching tab or scrolling away. Best scores stay on this device only, kept separately for each difficulty. Free to play: no account and no adverts.

From the island’s folklore

The lucky piggy.

In Manx folklore the Arkan Sonney, the “lucky piggy”, is a fairy pig: a beautiful little white pig that brings luck to anyone who sees it. The old people said that if you caught one, you would always find a silver coin in your pocket. Someone on a lucky run might hear, “You mus’ a met the arkan-sonney, bhoy.”

Long ago a child saw one beside the Bayr Corrag, an old lane that climbs from the Niarbyl road up to Dalby. Her uncle told her it couldn’t be caught and she should leave it alone, and it vanished. The folklorist W. W. Gill also heard of a fairy pig in “a little red hat”, which he thought was probably a pair of red ears, so ours has them.

“Arkan sonney” is a Manx name for the hedgehog, too, which is why a few hedgehogs share this glen. Every piggy in the game trots off free again, just as the uncle would have wanted. The saying comes from A Vocabulary of the Anglo-Manx Dialect (1924).

Read the tale in A Manx Scrapbook (1929)

Something’s rustling in the glen…

Quick hands, kind heart.