Tax season is upon us. Individual income tax returns are due April 15 in the United States. If you haven’t filed your taxes yet, why not procrastinate a little bit longer and play some games instead? Here are five games about taxes to play to procrastinate filing your taxes. Some involve filing virtual taxes, some involve avoiding them, and one actually helped people prep their real taxes in 2022. But they all have two things in common: adorable art styles and loads of fun.
Where to play: Itch.io (name your own price)
In Mother Truckin’ Taxes, you procrastinated on filing and need to drive straight to the IRS to drop it off. To make matters even worse, you also haven’t filled out the return yet, so you have to write while driving.
Where to play: Itch.io (name your own price)
Baba doesn’t know how to file taxes. In this cute game, you help Baba file their taxes by answering short questions and forging Baba’s signature. You will be scored on how accurately you replicate Baba’s signature. It’s available on Itch.io and you can name your own price.
A Game About Literally Doing Your Taxes
Perhaps this one is too on the nose. Sort through checks, bills, and envelopes and sort them into two piles: Taxes or Toss. It’s quite satisfying.
Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion
The actual gameplay isn’t as tax-related as in the previous games, but the premise is that Turnip Boy committed tax evasion and is now on a quest to destroy the corrupt vegetable government. Solve puzzles, fight creatures, and rip up tax documents on your journey. This is certainly the longest game of the bunch.
Join Iris in searching for deductions and love. Tax Heaven 3000 is a dating sim made to highlight how easy filing taxes can be, and how corporate tax filing services like TurboTax can be “predatory, parasitic bottlenecks that deliberately complicate the tax filing process in order to make it unnavigable by ordinary people.” Unfortunately, this game cannot be used to actually prepare your taxes anymore, because it was made for the 2022 filing year only.
