 This is a classic "roll to overcome your grief" indie game, where you use fairly traditional roleplaying techniques in an attempt to describe realistic characters facing everyday problems. The various life stages have different rules while still drawing on the same character traits and resources, which is a cool concept. I also really like the desert stage that you fall into if your character loses touch with other people. But there are also some choices that feel like mismatches. For example, why have relatively traditional stats (Mind, Body, Soul, Wealth) in a biographical game about real people? Why focus on conflict resolution and antagonism in a game about life's most important moments (which may not involve conflicts)? There are some ways to mitigate this by actively encouraging the type of "I want to prove I'm not a coward" conflicts that punctuate Dogs in the Vineyard (perhaps still the best game about growing up), but there's perhaps not enough of that kind of guidance here. Overall, though, my biggest concern is that the huge range of stories you could tell with such a game - from the bio of a nameless homeless woman to Abraham Lincoln to Conan - makes the game ultimately an enigma: it's very hard to know what you're going to get from it, especially with each player potentially telling a very different kind of story. It also seems to require immense creative leverage on the part of the players to keep the narrative content compelling, perhaps more than any other game I've ever seen (though Microscope may be similar). You have to invent, without much support, an entire set of people, their family members, and their entire lives. Sure, you do it in stages, which helps, but I would definitely appreciate places where I could choose from a set of options or have the game push me down particular paths, rather than have it be so completely open ended. It's as if the huge ambitions of the game aren't quite adequately supported with practical guidelines to make things more accessible.  This is a classic "roll to overcome your grief" indie game, where you use fairly traditional roleplaying techniques in an attempt to describe realistic characters facing everyday problems. The various life stages have different rules while still drawing on the same character traits and resources, which is a cool concept. I also really like the desert stage that you fall into if your character loses touch with other people. But there are also some choices that feel like mismatches. For example, why have relatively traditional stats (Mind, Body, Soul, Wealth) in a biographical game about real people? Why focus on conflict resolution and antagonism in a game about life's most important moments (which may not involve conflicts)? There are some ways to mitigate this by actively encouraging the type of "I want to prove I'm not a coward" conflicts that punctuate Dogs in the Vineyard (perhaps still the best game about growing up), but there's perhaps not enough of that kind of guidance here. Overall, though, my biggest concern is that the huge range of stories you could tell with such a game - from the bio of a nameless homeless woman to Abraham Lincoln to Conan - makes the game ultimately an enigma: it's very hard to know what you're going to get from it, especially with each player potentially telling a very different kind of story. It also seems to require immense creative leverage on the part of the players to keep the narrative content compelling, perhaps more than any other game I've ever seen (though Microscope may be similar). You have to invent, without much support, an entire set of people, their family members, and their entire lives. Sure, you do it in stages, which helps, but I would definitely appreciate places where I could choose from a set of options or have the game push me down particular paths, rather than have it be so completely open ended. It's as if the huge ambitions of the game aren't quite adequately supported with practical guidelines to make things more accessible. 