About Respawn Roulette

What it is

Respawn Roulette is a small browser game built around one question: who will you be in your next life? You spin a karmic wheel, and it tells you. It might be a bacterium in someone's gut, a trilobite on a Cambrian reef, a Tyrannosaurus, a Roman galley rower, a medieval serf, a 1970s tram driver or a farmer on an orbital station in the year 2280.

There is no account, no score and nothing to install. The game runs in your browser and works on phones and computers.

How the wheel works

Drag or flick the wheel to spin it. When it stops, the game draws one life at random from the full catalogue, with every being equally likely. It then places that being in a scene where it could actually have lived: a dinosaur only appears in a landscape from its own geological period, a gladiator in an arena, a penguin on a cold coast. Finally it gives you an age or date, from a few hundred million years ago to the distant future.

Each result has its own link, so you can share your next life, or download it as a picture card.

Eras on the wheel

The catalogue is divided into nine parts: microbes and micro-animals, the Paleozoic era, the Mesozoic era with dinosaurs and other reptiles, the Pleistocene Ice Age, Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the 20th century, animals of today and the future. Each era has an overview page in the encyclopedia.

The illustrations

Every being and every scene has its own illustration in a consistent satirical editorial style: ink outlines and flat gouache-like colour. They were created with the help of image-generation tools from detailed descriptions and reviewed by hand, and they are meant as playful portraits rather than scientific reconstructions. The encyclopedia text describes what the science actually says.

The encyclopedia

The encyclopedia is the serious half of the project. Each entry explains a life as it really was or is: body and senses, food, dangers, family life, lifespan and how we know what we know. Texts are written in English and Polish and are based on mainstream scientific and historical knowledge. Where experts disagree or a figure is only an estimate, the entry says so. If you spot an error, please tell us via the contact page and we will correct it.

Who makes it

Respawn Roulette is made by Content Writer sp. z o.o., a content company based in Poznań, Poland. The game is free and is funded by advertising, which is shown only after a spin and on content pages. Details are in our privacy policy and terms.