A twenty-something has turned tax season into a Pokémon-style boss battle.
PokéTax, released just in time for the April filing deadline, is a free, online, open-source game that you can use to file your taxes. It’s the creation of Pryce Adade-Yebesi, the 24-year-old co-founder and CEO of the AI-driven fintech startup Open Ledger.
“It’s like a joke that’s not a joke,” Adade-Yebesi told NYNext.
While TurboTax has users tediously input income, credits and deductions, PokéTax reframes the filing process as successive battles against “Tax Trainers.”
Players advance through the game by answering tax-related questions — “How much did you receive from pensions and annuities?” and “How much did you receive in unemployment compensation?” — posed by the trainers.
Answers are organized by the game’s built-in AI assistant. Along the way, players can pick up deductions in the form of shimmering “Gym Badges.”
When the final battle ends, the player is left with a completed return that they can review and file.
Though still in beta, the game is live and functional and more than 5,000 users have visited the site. Adade-Yebesi wouldn’t say how many have actually filed returns through the game.
He and his six-person team built PokéTax in about three weekends — mostly outside of work hours.
“We’ve got a core accounting company to run here, we can’t play Pokémon all the time,” the Washington University dropout said.
For the most part, he said, developers had no qualms coming in on Sundays to “jam on [the project].”
Most of them are fans of the Japanese game.
“We’re a bunch of nerds here,” Adade-Yebesi said.
But Pokètax was more than an excuse to revel in nostalgia — it was an opportunity to showcase the work Open Ledger was built to do.
Much like Stripe simplifies online payments, Open Ledger provides the building blocks for businesses to create customized accounting tools that automate bookkeeping, tax filing and finanicial reporting. The infrastructure handles the boring stuff, allowing developers to layer their own logic or user experiences on top.
In PokéTax’s case, the challenge wasn’t building the tax functionality — that already existed — but designing a fully playable game around it.
“That’s the magic,” Adade-Yebesi said.
The game’s visual engine was adapted from Pokémon Showdown, an open-source fan project launched by developer Zarel in 2011, so there were no IP concerns.
In the same spirit, Open Ledger plans to open-source PokéTax so that others can repurpose the underlying mechanics in new verticals like healthcare or science education.
Adade-Yebesi’s decision to share the code speaks to his broader thesis: Financial workflows, typically rigid and opaque, don’t have to stay that way.
“We all win when there are more cool and great experiences out there, rather than siloing that information,” he said.
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He sees PokéTax as the prototypical example of where things are headed: AI-powered, open-source and infinitely customizable. Productivity tools should be intuitive, maybe even a little fun.
“[There are] two things [we all] share,” said Adade-Yebesi. “You have to do taxes, or you go to jail, and a love for Pokémon.”
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