This game appears to be inactive — its website no longer exists. We marked it inactive on 12 October 2026. We have removed its links, because domains left behind by dead games are often taken over by unrelated sites. It used to live at serumcity.xyz.
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About Serum City
What is Serum City?
Serum City is a city builder set in the Mutant Cartel corner of the Yugaverse, made by Novel Labs with Faraway. It leans on the Mutant Ape Yacht Club's own ethos — a gritty, slightly psychedelic world whose mutants are outcasts even among other apes — and renders it in an illustrated, comic-book style rather than the glossy 3D most Web3 city builders reach for. The story is told as you play rather than delivered in front of it, which puts it closer to a transmedia serial than to a standard builder.
What you actually do
The loop is straightforward, and the developers describe it plainly: learn the ropes, build your section of the city, and climb the Mutant Cartel ranks until you are given access to the mysterious Capsule of Kaos. The Capsule is where the game opens up. Powerful Gear is crafted there by players "clever enough to figure out the recipes" — the recipes are not handed to you — and that Gear is what decides your place on the leaderboard. Along the way you accumulate Doubloons and Soul Gems, the two in-game resources, which are tracked on a dynamic NFT pass that updates as you play.
Seasons, prizes and getting in
Serum City runs in seasons, each bringing new collections, mechanics and prizes rather than simply resetting the board; the studio has said Season 2 carries an ApeCoin prize pool starting at a $100,000 minimum. It runs in the browser and, at the time of writing, its own front page describes the current state as super early access. Access is the one real barrier: claiming a pass requires holding an eligible NFT — Mutant Cartel Oaths, Mutant Hounds, or a MAYC or BAYC ape — so this is a game aimed squarely at that community rather than at a general audience.
Our verdict
Serum City is a city-building game built by Novel Labs with Faraway, running on Ethereum and drawing its cast from Yuga Labs' Mutant Ape Yacht Club and related NFT collections. Rather than treating those assets as cosmetic skins, it uses them as the population of a place: a gritty, mildly psychedelic city whose story centres on mutant apes framed as outcasts even within their own species.
What works is the framing. The comic-book illustrated art direction and the transmedia ambition give the project a reason to exist beyond token-holder utility, and the marginalisation-and-resilience angle is a sturdier narrative hook than most collection-derived games attempt. Building the world around an established lore rather than inventing one from scratch also means the fiction arrives pre-populated.
The reservations are structural. It is tied to Ethereum and to specific NFT collections, so the natural audience is people who already hold or care about those assets — anyone outside that circle has to buy into a world assembled around someone else's characters. City-builders also live or die on economic depth, and the available material describes the setting and the aesthetic far more than the loop you actually play.
Best suited to Mutant Ape holders and to players who want narrative and art direction from a blockchain city-builder.
This is our own editorial assessment. We do not score games — ratings come from players.
Serum City pros and cons
What we like
5 pros- Built on established Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFT assets and other collections
- Developed by Novel Labs in collaboration with Faraway
- Distinctive illustrated, comic book-inspired art style
- Transmedia design blends city-building gameplay with narrative storytelling
- Story world with real thematic depth around marginalization and resilience
What to watch
5 cons- Ethereum-only, so no multi-chain access
- Value is tied to holding NFTs from specific collections like MAYC
- City-building and strategy pace will not suit players wanting action
- Gritty, psychedelic MAYC aesthetic is a niche taste
- No stated free-to-play entry path or token details
Frequently Asked Questions
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Token
SERUM-CITY
Serum City
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