How to play One Life
How a life begins, how choices work, what the Life Questions are, how a life is scored, and how to play again.
One Life plays in any modern browser, on a phone or a computer, with nothing to install. A whole life takes about an hour, and you can close the tab at any point and come back to it later: the life is saved in your browser as you go.
Ways to start a life
The game’s first screen offers several doors.
- Random Life. The lottery. You are born somewhere in the world, to someone, the way births are dealt in the world. You do not choose where you start, because nobody does.
- Build Your Life. Choose the four things nobody chooses in life: where you are born, your sex, your household and the habits you arrive with. Then live it.
- Life Sprints. Today’s life: one life, the same for every player on the same day, laid out in periods from eighteen to ninety. Pick one and play a few years of it. The country takes turns, one a day, across all eight.
- Preset Lives. A library of lives already in motion: their debts, habits and people become yours.
- Simply Broken. Step into a life from the novel, already in progress, and decide what happens next.
- Match a Friend. Send someone the exact life you were dealt — the same birth, the same luck — and compare what the two of you made of it. This opens at level 3.
Childhood
A life begins at five. You can play the childhood — about a dozen decisions from five to eighteen, about home, school, friends and family — or let the years decide it. Either way, the childhood leaves its mark: the temperament, the habits and the people from it come with you into adulthood, and some of those people come back decades later.
Choices and odds
A life is told as a story, one scene at a time. Most scenes end in a decision, usually between two and four options, each with a short note on what it is likely to lead to. When an option depends on luck, the game rolls against real odds, moved by the life you have lived so far. Some scenes show THE REAL ODDS: the number for people in your position in the world.
Choices are rarely right or wrong. They have prices, and the prices arrive at different times. Staying late wins the promotion and costs the friendship; the safe job pays the mortgage and costs the dream. The game remembers, and the people in your life remember.
Life Questions
Some decisions are bigger than others. One Life calls them Life Questions: the turning points that come up in most lives, asked when they would really come up. There are 33 of them across eleven themes — love, children, career, business, money, friendship, family, health, fame, crime and purpose — and they come in stages. “Do you marry?” comes before “Do you stay married?”; “Do you start a business?” before “Do you expand or sell?” Your answers change which stories come next.
What you want from the life
Early in adulthood, the game asks what you want from this life. You choose three to five things — wealth, career, family, love, health, happiness, adventure, impact, status, freedom or legacy — and say how much each one weighs. These are the measures the life will be judged by at the end. You can play without choosing, but the score means more if you do.
The dials
At the top of the screen, four dials show how the life is going: money, people (how close you are to the people who matter), peace (how much stress you are carrying), and school or work. Beside them, a short line describes who you are becoming, based on what you have actually done. Panels show the people in your life, the world around you, the novel of your life so far, your badges and your goals.
The years
Between scenes, time passes. Months and years go by in a few lines: pay rises and falls, people move in and out, bills arrive, the body ages. Then the next story begins. A life lasts as long as its odds and its choices allow. You can also end a life yourself at any time.
The end of a life
When a life ends, the game writes its account:
- Life Fulfilled, the main score: 60% from how much of what you said you wanted you got, and 40% from how the life felt — the years, the people, the mood it was lived in.
- Where the life ranks against 24 other lives that started exactly like yours, on eight measures from wealth to comebacks. A life can rank first at one and nowhere at the rest; that is also a way to win.
- What the life earned: the badges kept, the ones lost, and the rarest thing you did.
- The book of the life: every scene you read and every choice you made, in order, as a book you can download.
From the first screen of the end you can live another life, replay this start (the same birth and the same luck, with only your choices changed) or go back to one decision and see the other road.
Badges, XP and levels
Lives earn XP from what they achieved and the badges they kept. Levels, up to level 10, open new ways to play, such as harder starts and Match a Friend. Levels never make a life easier: they open content, not advantages.
Tips for a first life
- Read the notes under each option. They are honest about what an option tends to lead to.
- Set your goals. A life judged by what you wanted is more interesting than one judged by money.
- Do not play safe every time. The safe option often costs something you will only notice later.
- Look after a few people. In One Life, as in life, the people who stay are worth more than almost anything else.