A living world of letters
The game you can play without playing.
The Letterheads wake knowing nothing. On their own, they find food, make friends, form words, discover fire and walk 300,000 years of human history across the real Earth. You can watch, help, or just leave it running.
One world, shared live by everyone who visits. Free, no account, on a phone or a computer.
How it works
Every letter is alive.
The letter is the body and the glow is the life. A glowing box around a few of them is a family: a word.
They think for themselves.
Each letter has needs, a nature, dreams and memories. Tap one and ask why it is doing what it does. The answer comes from its own life, not a script. Nobody writes the story and nobody controls them.
Their time is your time.
One day in the valley is one calendar day for you, and night falls when it falls where you are. Leave it running and come back later: the Story so far keeps every chapter, from who was born to who found fire and which words formed.
The ground is the real Earth.
The valley is built from real heights and Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite imagery, with each era's plants restored from pollen records. The rivers, hills and coasts are where they really are, and the place names are real.
300,000 years in three
One family walks the real route of humanity.
History moves while the world lives. As the clock runs, the family moves with our species out of Africa and across Europe, and their valley becomes each of these real places in turn.
- 300,000years agoOmo Kibish, Ethiopia
- 80,000years agoThe Nile at Luxor, Egypt
- 62,000years agoGalilee, the Levant
- 50,000years agoHatay, Anatolian coast
- 46,000years agoThe Iron Gates of the Danube
- 36,000years agoDolní Věstonice, Moravia
- 26,000years agoThe Vézère valley, France
- 16,000years agoDoggerland, now under the North Sea
- 8,300years agoThe middle Danube, first farmers
- 3,600years agoMycenae, the Argolid
- 2,800years agoThe Palatine Hill, Rome
Sea levels follow Spratt and Lisiecki (2016) and Lambeck and others (2014). Every date and place is marked in the game as checked or awaiting expert review.
The trailer
300,000 years of being human, in 86 seconds.
Two ways to be here
Watch the story, or step into it.
Watch
Nothing to learn.
The camera finds the best stories for you and a caption says what is happening now. Put it on a spare screen and let a civilization grow in the corner of your day.
Take part
Adopt a letter and help it.
Point out ripe fruit, a safe crossing or a friend. It may listen, or it may choose its own way. Adopting is a relationship, not ownership.
Questions
- Is it free?
- Yes. There are no ads and nothing to buy.
- Do I need an account?
- No. Everyone who visits shares the same world. Your adopted letters, sparks and valley are kept in your browser. To take them to another phone or computer, open Valleys in the game and make a link to move them.
- Does it work on my phone?
- Yes. It runs in any modern browser on a phone, tablet or computer. Nothing to install.
- Can I have a world of my own?
- Yes. Open Valleys in the game and start your own valley. Share its link and friends can watch it and help your letters live, and it glows on the Atlas for anyone to visit. You can even send one of your letters to The World.
- Does it keep running when I leave?
- Yes. The letters live on whether anyone is watching or not. When you come back, whatever happened while you were away has happened: new words, new letters, discoveries, and history moving on. The game tells you what you missed.
- Is the history accurate?
- The ground, rivers, coasts and sea levels come from scientific data. The letters and their lives are the game's own. Dates still awaiting expert review are marked as such.
- Is anything tracked?
- No. The game collects nothing about you, and the world server keeps only the world itself. Fonts load from Google Fonts.