Born Anywhere: Life Simulator

Born Anywhere — how much does the place you're born change your life? A life board game that runs on real world statistics.

Your country is drawn in proportion to the real number of births. You might be born a girl in rural Nigeria, a boy in a South Korean city, or a child in a small village in India. Walk a life map where one tile is one year, choose your path at forks for school, work, marriage and emigration, and let that country's life tables decide when and how your life ends.

■ Made for
• Fans of life simulators and life games
• Anyone curious how different lives around the world really are
• Friends and families looking for a board game to play together
• Students and teachers who want to feel statistics instead of reading tables

■ 1. Paths that open and close with real data
Every fork shows its odds. Middle school, university, a formal job, moving abroad — how likely each is for your country and family shows as path colours and probability badges. Paths you can't reach are locked, and sometimes luck opens a closed road.

■ 2. A life map, one year per tile
From birth to old age you move year by year along a road over a diorama town. Event cards for school, work, marriage, children, illness and accidents appear while your health, money, education, family and happiness gauges move. Every event is labelled Real data, Model estimate or Story, so you always know what is data and what is storytelling.

■ 3. A score with birth luck removed
When a life ends you get a tombstone and a summary. Your lifespan, education, income and family are compared with 1,000 lives born exactly like you (same country, sex and household). It shows what your choices changed, not the luck of where you were born. Replay the same birth and compare both lives side by side.

■ 4. Today's Birth
Once a day every player in the world is born as the same baby. See how your choices differed from everyone else's and how long that baby lived on average in the worldwide results. Share your result with friends without spoilers.

■ 5. Friends mode (one device or online)
Two to four players are born in the same country in the same year and live their own lives. Meet at the same school or workplace, propose marriage, lend each other money. Pass one phone around, or create a room with an invite code and play on your own phones. Friends mode has no ads.

■ 6. Records and achievements
Every life you live is kept in your records. Collect the countries you were born in on a world map and unlock achievements.

■ Data sources
Public statistics from the UN World Population Prospects, the World Bank, the WHO and others (via Our World in Data). Settings → Data sources lists the source and year of each indicator and every value filled in by estimate.

■ Light and private
No sign-up or login. Your lives are stored on your device, and online features work with a random device token only. Larger text and a reduce-sensitive-scenes option are available.

This game is a simulation based on real statistics. It does not represent or predict the life of any country or person.