A free game in your browser

Ice Age Life

You're born into a band of hunter-gatherers on the Ice Age steppe, 22,000 years ago. You grow up, you lead them through the seasons, and you get old, if you're lucky.

Play free in your browserNothing to install. No account.
Also on iPhone Android
Where a life starts: the Dnieper Mammoth Steppe, 22,000 years ago, and a button to begin Unoru's life.
A spring board: Mudslide, Wolves on the Trail and First Greens across the top, the band waiting in the hand below.
Unoru at 18: health, spirit and prestige, and a card about the stories told around the fire.

Where you're born, a spring board, and a year of your life. Real screens from the game.

One Stone Age life, start to finish.

Then you die and do it again as someone new.

How a life goes

From a kid underfoot to the elder the young ones stop listening to.

A year at a time. Each one brings something to decide and a season to get through. The game doesn't skip the boring parts, and it doesn't skip the hard ones.

Inside a hide-covered mammoth-bone house, a grandmother holds a newborn up to the firelight while the mother rests.
Every life starts here, in a family you didn't choose.
18years

Initiated

When the bands meet, you're offered names, shaped by what you've done.

Drag through a life. Everyone in the game has a face for each stage, and grows into it.

What kind of life is yours? You find out by living it.

  • Hunt mammoth until the band can't eat without you.

  • Fall hard for someone two camps over.

  • Raise three kids through a winter that was only meant to take one.

  • Take in a half-wild wolf.

  • Cross the wrong man and spend the next twenty years squaring it.

  • Do something worth remembering, and hear your name long after you're gone.

The season board

Every season is a board.

The weather, the herds, the sickness and the strangers come up as cards, and you decide who in your band meets which one. Send the wrong person at a wolf pack and you lose them. Send nobody and everyone goes hungry.

Try a round. These three cards are from a real spring in the game, scored the way the game scores them.

The end of a season: what the band ate, who was hurt, and who got better at something.
You see it coming

Each card tells you whether it holds before you commit, including harm that would reach camp.

You see the sum

Every result shows its working, like Hunt 53 +21 lent = 74 vs 50. A loss you can check is one you learn from.

Or let the band sort it

Hit Auto-play and everyone finds a place. Step in when it matters.

Spring melt on a steppe trail: two hunters with spears face three wolves while a mudslide breaks loose on the slope behind them.
Wolves on the Trail. Who do you send?

Your band

Thirty-odd people, each living their own life.

Nobody in the band is scenery. They pair up, have kids, grieve, fall out and move away on their own time. And every one of them has a mood, and a feeling about you.

Dahak is simply herself today: present, capable, unhurried.
From Dahak's profile
The Sun Rock Band, sorted into the day's parties: gatherers, small-game hunters, a hunting party, and those at camp.
Dahak's profile: her mood, how you get on, and what you can do about either.

Everyone has their own face, at every age.

Morning in a steppe camp: a gathering party heads for the creek while hunters check their spears and children chase a puppy.
Morning in camp. Everyone has somewhere to be.
A family with packs and a dog walks away from camp toward a neighboring band's smoke on the horizon, friends waving goodbye.
When a band gets too big, a household packs up and joins the neighbors.

Wolf to dog

Every first life starts with a wolf at the edge of camp.

Taming it is the first goal in the game. There's no bond meter to watch. The game just tells you, in words, how it's going.

  1. wary still
    “Grey-Foot watched you eat tonight from just past the firelight, and did not run when you looked up.”
  2. warming to you
    “Grey-Foot fell in beside you on the walk to the water, and you only noticed halfway back.”
  3. almost yours
    “Grey-Foot brought you a gnawed bone and dropped it at your feet, watching your face.”
  4. chosen

    Then he chooses you. Now he comes with the band every season, not just the cold ones.

The quotes are real lines from the game.

Autumn dusk at the edge of camp: a lean, wary wolf stands just past the firelight while a young woman crouches and holds out a strip of meat at arm's length.
Every first life starts here: tame the wolf at the edge of camp.
Cold months first

A half-wild wolf only runs with the band in autumn and winter, when you're both after the same herds. In spring and summer it's off at its den.

It hunts with you

On the season board, a dog that's bonded to you lends its strength on a hunt.

Pups of your own

Raise a camp-born pup whose mother or father is a dog you're bonded to.

Every dog has a story

When it joined you, when it chose you, its first hunt, its litters, and its death.

Dogs get the same 16 temperaments as people.

  • Lively or reserved
  • Curious or cautious
  • Sweet or sharp
  • Biddable or willful

Four traits from real dog personality research. And 32 faces, a pup and a grown dog for each.

Inside a winter house by the fire, a small child holds a sleepy camp-born pup while its mother, once a wolf at the edge of camp, lies watching with her chin on her paws.
A camp-born pup, and a mother who chose you.
A winter hunt on open snow: two hunters with spears run behind two dogs that are turning a small herd of reindeer toward them.
A bonded dog hunts beside you.

Eight homelands

8 places to be born, so far.

Every first life starts on the Mammoth Steppe. Each homeland after that opens once you've carried a line through the one before it.

  1. Open grass steppe under a huge sky, a mammoth family crossing a river, a small hide camp on the bank.
    Dnieper Mammoth SteppeDnieper Valley, modern-day Ukraine

    "We go out with the herds and we come back to the same houses."

  2. Yellow loess terraces cut by deep gullies, dry grassland, wild horses running ahead of a storm front.
    The East Wind PlainsOrdos loess, modern-day China

    "Other people chase. We dig in and let the year come to us."

  3. The red desert heart: red sand, spinifex, a dry riverbed and a lone rock rising at dusk.
    The Great South LandThe Western Desert, modern-day Central Australia

    "Wait at the water and the meat walks to you."

  4. Snow-capped peaks above a frozen river valley edged with larch, a small line of travelers on the ice.
    The Frozen HeartThe Altai, modern-day southern Siberia and Mongolia

    "Follow the reindeer, not your feet."

  5. A deep dry river canyon, a rock shelter with ochre animal paintings, springbok on the rim.
    The Painted SouthThe ǀAi-ǀAis country, modern-day southern Namibia

    "Everything here is measured out from the water."

  6. A green river under pale limestone cliffs with rock shelters, reindeer crossing at a ford, morning mist.
    The Sheltered ValleyThe Dordogne, modern-day southwest France

    "There is always someone over the next rise here."

  7. An escarpment above acacia savanna and a lake, zebra and giraffe, a band resting under one wide tree.
    The Great RiftThe Central Rift highlands, modern-day Kenya

    "There is no cold season here, so do not wait for one."

  8. A blue glacier meeting a cold sea, seals on the floes, a skin boat pulled up on a shingle beach.
    The World's EdgeThe Bering coast, modern-day Alaska

    "Camp where the sea comes up, not where the ground looks good."

  9. Later eras

    Locked for now. More are coming.

Torchlight in a cave: a child presses an ochre hand to the wall beside the faded handprints of people long gone.

When it ends

Then winter takes you too. It takes everyone.

There's no saving and no redoing things. You make your choices, time keeps moving, and eventually the life is over. That's just how it works.

But your soul doesn't stop. It starts over as someone new, somewhere else, and something of who you were comes with it.

  1. One life ends
  2. Your soul goes on
  3. Someone new is born

Straight answers

The short, honest version.

What's in the browser version?
The same game, without the shop. It's free, with nothing to buy, no account and nothing to install. There's a banner ad under the game while you play. Your save lives in that browser, so the app is the better home for a life you want to keep.
And on the phone?
Also free. There are optional ads you can watch for a bonus and a few things to buy if you want them, but you can play the whole game without paying for anything. A Firekeeper membership turns the ads off.
Do I need an account?
No. It opens straight into a life. On the phone you can sign in with Apple or Google later to back up your progress, but you never have to.
Does it need the internet?
The browser version loads from the web. On iPhone and Android a life plays fully offline, and your save lives on your phone.

Go live one.

Someone's about to be born on the steppe. It's free, it runs in your browser, and there's nothing to install.

Play nowFree in your browser
App Store Google Play