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.

First release on Google Play: one of 117 billion lives drawn by real weights of era, place and station, written into a parish register; 2,400 everyday lines, 465 real events, 345 forks with every door shown, calamities of their own time, the chest of keepsakes handed down to great-grandchildren, the atlas and the census. English and Russian.