An accounting startup has turned tax preparations into a Pokémon Showdown game

Accounting software company Open Ledger has launched a new product in time for tax day. 

Meet PokéTax, a game that helps make tax filing quite fun. Instead of tax forms, users take on Tax Trainers — gym leaders — representing different parts of a tax form, such as income, deductions, and credits. Each leader asks questions that help players complete their tax forms. 

“Once you finish your PokéTax run, we guide you to the IRS Direct File site to officially submit,” Open Ledger co-founder Pryce Adade-Yebesi told TechCrunch. The game is an adaptation of the open source Pokémon game called Pokémon Showdown, and he promised this was not an April Fool’s joke. 

“This is real; it works. Tax fraud isn’t funny — and neither is the IRS,” he said. 

Adade-Yebesi and Ashtyn Bell launched Open Ledger earlier this year and raised a $3 million round led by Kindred Ventures and Black Ventures. Adade-Yebesi said his team first built this product, which is open source, as a joke. “Could we actually pull this off?” he and his team pondered. The answer was clearly yes. 

The game has an AI assistant that helps organize users’ responses, and players can win badges — discover new deductions — as they take on the Tax Trainers. 

Taxes are such an unloved part of being a good citizen that few founders think of turning the process into a game. Notably, in 2023, there was the dating-style game Tax Heaven 3000, where users went on a date with an avatar named Iris who asked questions to help complete a tax form. But that was only for the 2022 tax filing year. 

Adade-Yebesi hopes that by adding fun to such financial processes, they will be “more engaging and way less soul-sucking.” 

Taxes are due April 15.