Scanlings™

Scan a barcode. Get a creature.

The same packet gives the same creature on every phone, forever.

Play

Free. No account needed.

How it works

  1. Point your phone at a barcode. Anything — a pasta packet, a tin, a bottle of shampoo, something on a shelf in a shop you are walking through.
  2. The digits become a creature. Its body, its colours, its pattern, its stats and its name all come out of the number. Nothing is rolled twice.
  3. It is yours, and it is the same for everyone. That packet gives the same creature to you, to your friend, and to a stranger in another country — today and in ten years.

What a barcode actually is

A number, printed as stripes so a machine can read it. Almost every product in the world carries one, and it is unique to that product — which is the whole reason this game can promise you the same creature every time.

There are a few kinds. Scanlings reads the three you will actually meet, and you can try all of them right here.

Reading this on your phone? These are for scanning off another screen — open the page on a computer, or just go and find a real packet.

8001123456783
EAN-13 — thirteen digits, and what most of the world uses: Europe, Asia, Australia, South America. If you are holding a supermarket product outside North America, it is almost certainly one of these.
036000291452
UPC-A — twelve digits, the North American one. The same idea, one digit shorter. We read it as the EAN-13 it really is, so a product sold on both sides of the Atlantic gives the same creature either way.
96385074
EAN-8 — the short one, for packets too small for the full thirteen digits. Chewing gum, a little tin, a sachet. It does not hold a creature. It holds something to wear — found the same way, by scanning a real packet, and never bought.

Found so far

—

distinct creatures discovered by players, out of roughly a trillion barcodes in the world.

See the boards →

This is a beta, and here is what that means

  • Your creatures will change. We are still drawing bodies, heads and limbs. When new art lands, some creatures are re-rolled and yours may end up looking different. We will say so, in the app, before it happens.
  • Balance will move. Stats, rarity and battle numbers are being tuned. Nothing is final until battles have actually been played.
  • Nothing you find is lost. Your scans are saved and backed up. First discoveries stay yours permanently, even if the creature's picture changes.
  • It is free, and it stays free to play. No ads, and no timers you can pay to skip. Everything in the game is found by scanning or bought with gold you earned playing — there is nothing to buy with real money, and no way to pay your way past anybody. One day there may be things to buy that change how your creatures look, and that is all: never anything that wins a fight, and never gold.

What is coming

Now

Playable today

  • Scanning and collecting — the core loop, live
  • Offline scanning — eggs that hatch when you reconnect
  • Four creature families — biped, quad, round and winged
  • Sparring — a team of five, fought with nothing to lose
  • Leaderboards — opt-in, by your name or anonymously, with your place either way
  • Titles — held by whoever currently leads, and taken the day somebody passes them
  • Achievements — over a hundred badges, one for every body, skin, marking and eye the game can make
  • Something to earn by fighting — so a win is worth having
  • Offline sparring — the Instructor travels with you
  • Something else in small barcodes — items, worn by your Keeper, found the same way as everything else
  • The tower — something to climb between events
  • Somewhere to spend what you find — stocked by players, not by us
  • Sound and music — every effect made from numbers, and eight tracks for the menus

Next

Being built

  • An app on Google Play — being tested now

Later

Designed, not started

  • Bosses — a weekly one for you, a monthly one for everybody at once
  • Serpentine creatures — a fifth family

Drawn by hand

Every body, head, leg and tail is drawn on a fixed grid at a fixed palette, one pixel at a time. No AI-generated art, anywhere. Creatures are assembled from those parts, so one new head changes thousands of them at once.

Over a billion different-looking creatures are possible today, and the number grows every time something new is drawn. You can play at two sizes, too — the small ones above are the same creatures at the chunkier setting.

What we store

A name you choose, the barcodes you scan, and when you scanned them. That is the whole list.

We do not store your email or your real name, and the private notes you write on a creature never leave your phone. Nothing is sold or shared, and there are no trackers or ads.