ONE LIFE
A life simulation where the odds are real.
free · no sign-up needed · plays in your browser
five moments from one life, as the game plays them
A life simulation where the odds are real.
free · no sign-up needed · plays in your browser
five moments from one life, as the game plays them
You live a whole life, one choice at a time — from the small things to the ones that decide everything — and nothing is guaranteed.
Every outcome is rolled against the odds a real person would face. Studying harder improves your chances; it does not hand you the job. Skipping the doctor does not kill you, and it does not let you off either. The life you end up with is what those odds did with the choices you made.
Your choices move hazards, never certainties.
A country, a household, a body. Nobody picks those, so neither do you. The childhood is yours to live from five, or to leave to the years.
Between decisions, time runs. People age, money moves, chances open and close while you are looking elsewhere.
When something happens, you can ask why — and see the chain of choices and the roll that led there.
You cannot keep a spare. Ending a life is a decision, and the record of it is yours to read afterwards.
One world a day, the same one for every player on earth. A whole life in under twenty decisions and about ten minutes. Tomorrow it is somebody else's.
Step into a life already in progress, with its people and its unfinished business. What happens next has not been written.
From the novel Simply Broken by Opeyemi Olufunmi Michaels.
Born somewhere, to a family you did not choose. A childhood from five, if you want it, then seventy years of your own decisions, each one leaving its mark.
Invite someone into the exact life you were dealt — same start, same luck — and compare what the two of you made of it.
Every roll in One Life starts from what really happens to people. These are some of the numbers, explained in plain English, with their sources.
About half of first marriages in the US reach their twentieth anniversary.
WorkFour in five see their first birthday. Half see their fifth. A third see their tenth.
HealthMore than ten years lost on average, and almost all of it regained by quitting before forty.
Where you startFrom about 85 years in Japan to about 55 in Nigeria: the first roll, and the largest.
FriendsLoneliness raises the risk of dying early by about as much as smoking does.
MoneySix in ten American adults could pay a surprise $400 bill in cash. The rest could not.
All sixteen articles on the real odds → The eight countries → How to play →
The whole game works on a phone: the same lives, the same odds, the same seventy years. Pick it up on the bus and put it down again.
Start a life on a laptop and carry on from your phone — sign in with your email and it follows you. No password, and one life at a time wherever you are.
Thousands of choices. One life.
Play nowAnd there is a book
a novel by Opeyemi Olufunmi Michaels
One of the four ways into the game came out of a novel. Simply Broken is the story of Tinu, Tayo, Fola and Lara — four people who love each other, hurt each other, leave, return and forgive, and find that forgiveness does not put everything back the way it was.
But being broken is not the same as being finished.
It is finished and not yet published. The first three chapters are free to read now, and you can hear when the rest of it is out.