Christmas 2013 Event



The Christmas 2013 Event (or the Holidays 2013 Event) was the fifth major event to be released for The Simpsons: Tapped Out. It is the second of two Christmas themed events released for the game. The event was said by the developer, Electronic Arts, to be the biggest update yet. It was available to all players on December 10, 2013. The new currency introduced in the event is gift cards, which can be obtained from the Present Depot or from having friends visit the player's Springfield and leaving gift bags. A new splashscreen and app icon were also released as it was a major event. The Christmas 2013 Event is the current installation in the game.

The prize system returned which was previously used in the Treehouse of Horror XXIV Event, including community prizes. Many of the Christmas quests from the past Christmas event returned, this time with gift cards as the reward as opposed to santa coins. The Christmas 2013 Event brought a lot of content and new gameplay. More was released in this event than the previous Christmas event, but this could be due to a rise in the games popularity and high demand for new content. For players who frequently visit other Springfields, the event bought useful shortcuts into the game. Most notably, the player could now travel forward and backwards through their friends list from their Springfield's, allowing neighbor visits to be much faster and easier.

Another key feature was the character locate button, which when tapped, brings the player to a character who is currently not doing a job or needs to activate a quest. This was a much needed addition for those who have lots of characters and buildings in their Springfields, as characters can become hard to locate otherwise.



In addition to all the new content and the prize system, a new minigame, the Holiday Wheel, was introduced. This was a unique minigame and consisted of collecting spin tokens from the Egg Nog Bar. A token is received every 24 hours as income, and can be used for one play at spinning the wheel. There are 10 sections in the wheel and wherever the wheel stops determines which prize the player receives, the hardest prizes to claim being the Snow Monster and Claus Co.

Players can now place gift bags in their friends' Springfields too, and when opened will reward the player with gift cards and in rare cases, a spin token. A maximum of five gift bags can be placed in each neighbor's Springfield every day.

A number of quests were added, including the main quest chain, Too Much of a Good Thing, as well as a series of minor quests. Most of these minor quests were unlocked upon earning Personal, Community, or Holiday Wheel prizes.

Prizes
In the event, the prize system returned from the two preceding events. The player must collect gift cards in order to win exclusive personal prizes. In this event, community prizes were seen again but were not earned by players collecting gift cards, like the personal prizes were. Instead, the community prizes were earned when certain numbers of gift bags had been left in friends' Springfield's.

Community Prizes
Below is a table showing the number of gift bags which must be placed by all players of The Simpsons: Tapped Out. The first prize required 450 million gift bags to be placed, and the highest prize requires just over 1 billion. So far, only the first three prizes have been achieved by players, with the players currently working towards getting The Yes Guy, a new job-giving character. The community prizes originally had much larger targets, but they were lowered when accumulation of gift bags occurred much slower than anticipated.

As of December 26, 10 AM EST, gifts were increasing at approximately 700/second. Based on a more conservative 600/second, the projected dates are listed below.

Holiday Wheel minigame

 * Main article: Holiday Wheel

The Holiday Wheel is a new unique minigame. For each spin of the wheel, the player must have a spin token. Spin tokens are obtained once a day from Egg Nog Bar, by purchasing them with donuts, or, once all the personal prizes are obtained, every 1000 gift cards will grant the player one token. The prizes include the holiday façades from the previous Christmas Event, Mr. Plow, Plow King, Claus Co and many more newer prizes.

New content
Below is a list of all the new content included in the event. Note that some or all of the items listed below may not be available after the event.

Returning content

 * See also: Christmas 2012 Event

Below is a list of content which was previously released with the 2012 Christmas Event, and re-released for this event.

Holiday Donut Sale
Following The Great Donut Caper quest on December 24th, Gil Gunderson appeared in Springfield to offer players a sale, giving up to a 30% bonus on donuts. This sale ends on December 31st.

Trivia

 * On the event splashscreen, you can see a building in the distance saying "cleaners". This might indicate that the Springfield cleaners will soon come to the game.

Other languages

 * German