PRINTED SERPENT

PRINTED SERPENT is a happysad game about the last days of the Earth where you use printed receipts to build a world serpent and fight other great wurms for the right to devour the world. There’s no blessed hero to save the day: a serpent of avarice is going to destroy everything anyway, and the only question is whether it’s going to be YOUR serpent that does the honours. Yay!

To play this game, you just need two players, a coin and, crucially, some printed receipts that'll serve as building blocks, or the flesh, for your own world serpent. Have you ever noticed how quickly those receipts accumulate even when we don't buy much of anything — and how quickly we forget what transactions they were ever a part of? This game was developed as an attempt to make our everyday consumption more visible and reveal the sad (and slightly absurd) nature of it. Have sad fun exploring it!

FAQ:

Q: It seems like the final showdown is very unrewarding and unfair, with the winner largely determined by chance and not by skill or anything else. Is that by design?

A: Yes. Welcome to capitalism.

(but it was still quite fun collecting recipes and anticipating the showdown, was it not? our brains are very weird sometimes)

 

The game is developed by Teona Kokoreva, a queer game designer and artist, and is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0. It is completely free (duh). At the same time, If you want to support me and my games, you can buy me a coffee: 100% of donations will go to support Ukraine and queer human rights orgs.

Printed Serpent is currently available in Kyrgyz, English and Russian. If you want to help translating it into your native language, hit me up!

The game was adapted to Kyrgyz by the brilliant Akmaral Asankan, with slight edits by Darina Kaparova & Zere Asylbek kyzy.

This page's banner features art by the brilliant Assem Sultanova.