Scanlings Live

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. 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. That packet gives the same creature to you, to your friend, and to a stranger in another country — today and in ten years. There are roughly a trillion barcodes in the world. Most of them have never been scanned by anyone. FINDING THEM Every barcode is a creature nobody may have seen yet. When you are the first person in the world to scan one, that is recorded, and it stays recorded — the catalogue is shared, and being first to find something is part of it. The short barcodes — chewing gum, a sachet, a little tin — work differently. They hold something to wear. Your Keeper puts it on, and it changes how your teams fight. WHAT YOU DO WITH THEM Spar on the beach against the Instructor, a team built from creatures players have really found. It works without a signal. Climb the tower, floor by floor, with no second tries. Fight the weekly boss: one registered fight a week with your best five, paid for the share of its health you take. Its element is a secret until you read it off a stone at the archaeologist's tent. Build a village. Put your creatures to work at the mine, the lake and the forge, raise buildings, unlock techs, and send teams on expeditions that come back with materials and gold. Spend your gold in the shop, where the shelf changes every day and broken things can be traded for a draw. There are leaderboards, and titles that change hands when somebody beats you to them. WHAT IT COSTS It is free to play, and it will not be pay to win. Gold is earned by playing, there is no way to buy your way past anybody, and everything worth having is found by scanning something real. HOW IT TREATS YOU The camera reads the barcode on your phone. No photo is stored and none is sent anywhere. You do not need an account to play. If you make one, it is so your collection survives a lost phone — we keep the name you choose, what you have scanned, and what you have done in the game. That is written out in full, in plain words, on our privacy page, and you can delete your player from inside the app whenever you want — what that erases, and the two things it keeps, are written out there too. Your name and your totals appear on the public leaderboards, and those boards are also posted to our Discord. You can make your name private and keep your place — the board shows a generated label instead. We do not sell any of it. We never will. STILL BEING DRAWN Your creatures will change. We are still drawing bodies, heads and limbs, and a creature you found today may look different in a month. The number behind it never changes, so it stays the same creature — but it will not always look the way it looks now. We would rather tell you that than surprise you with it.