Lot: The Lottery of Birth

About 117 billion people have ever been born. Lot draws you one of them, fairly, weighted by era, place and station. So you are most often a peasant long before 1800, and nearly half of the time you don't live to five.

The life is written into a parish register in the registrar's hand, a page at a time. At each fork you see every door, including the shut ones and why they are shut. Each life leaves one thing in the chest, and a great-grandchild can inherit it. Free, no ads, no account, no internet.

🏷 THE DRAW
• Shake the sack and a wooden tag rises with the year, the place, the family and boy or girl burnt into it
• The odds come with it: how many of everyone who ever lived were born like you, how many children here live to five, how many people around you can read
• Birth weights follow the Population Reference Bureau's estimate of everyone who has ever lived
• Before the draw you may ask for an era, a part of the world, or to be born a boy or a girl; within that the lot keeps the real weights

📖 THE BOOK
• Each page turned is a few years: childhood, work, a match, hard times, old age, death
• About 2,400 everyday lines across six ages, tied to region, family, sex and years, so China reads like China
• 465 real events reach a life as rumours and consequences: the Black Death, the Mongols, the silk caravans, the first satellite crawling across the sky
• Rarely you pass someone later written about: Socrates arguing in the square, Ibn Battuta writing down how you bake bread
• Handwritten or printed, as you like

🚪 THE DOORS
• At each fork every door is shown, but some are shut, and it says why: Girls are not taught their letters. You are not free to leave. The elders have already agreed.
• 345 forks: a stranger asks for shelter, the recruiting sergeant comes, a cousin abroad offers work
• The great crisis of a life is a real calamity of its time and place: a Nile that did not rise, the plague, the Irish blight, the Spanish flu, the plant that closed
• Outcomes are weighted, not judgements. Or be a witness and let fate choose at every fork

🧺 THE CHEST
• Each life leaves one thing: a bone needle, a clay tablet recording a debt, a greatcoat button, a push-button phone
• After a life with children, draw a great-grandchild born 70–94 years later in the same place: the surname, the family's means and the same thing pass on
• The thing gathers its holders, generation after generation

🗺 ATLAS, CENSUS, CHRONICLE
• Your birthplaces pinned on an old map, with a slider through time
• Your lots next to the real spread of everyone ever born
• Every real event your lives have met, and every famous person seen in passing
• At the end a life asks one quiet question about you today; the answers gather in a notebook

ALSO
• Every life is replayed from its seed and your choices, so any book in the archive can be read again in full
• English and Russian
• Free and open source (MIT)

Privacy: no account, no ads, no analytics, no internet permission. Your lives stay in the app's private files on your phone.