How it works
I. Build a peasant
Four choices and one lucky draw of fate. Every pick shifts your odds in the medieval meat-grinder.
II. Watch them die
Live year by year through plague, famine, war and the occasional falling hay cart. Most peasants don’t see forty.
III. Share the record
Get an illuminated parish record of your life and death. Compare your age with the world, and dare your friends to last longer.
How long would you survive medieval England?
A Good Death is a free browser game about surviving the Middle Ages as an ordinary English peasant. You build a life from a trade, a village, a lord and a single lucky possession, then watch it play out through a world of dysentery, bad harvests, feudal justice and the Black Death. Your score is simply how old you manage to get — and dying peacefully in bed of old age is the rarest achievement of all.
Every day brings a new shared seed: the same world for everyone, so a plague year is a plague year for the whole parish. The same choices in a different year, or different choices in the same year, tell a very different tale. There are no accounts to make and nothing to buy — just a quick, funny, faintly grim reminder of how brutal, and how strangely survivable, medieval life could be.
Is A Good Death free?
Yes — completely free, no account, no cost. It runs in any modern browser on phone or desktop.
How do you play?
Pick a trade, a village, a lord and an item, then draw one random piece of fortune. Your peasant lives out their years and eventually dies; you get a shareable parish record and a score, which is their age at death.
What is a 'good death'?
Reaching seventy or more and dying quietly in bed. In a world of plague and hay carts it’s a genuine rarity — only a lucky few manage it.
Is it historically accurate?
It’s played for deadpan laughs rather than as a textbook, but the trades, illnesses, taxes and calamities are all rooted in real medieval English life. Everything is fictional — no real people are named.