Family Life

Brightwater, Indiana. Forty thousand people, one lake, one Main Street, and your family in the middle of it. Build them yourself. Pick your age, eighteen to grandparent. Pick your relationship: single, married, married forty years, divorced, widowed, it’s complicated. Pick how many kids and how old. Pick whether your parents are together, split, gone, or not speaking to you. Pick your siblings and where you fall, your grandparents, your extended family, who you live with, what kind of house, the dog, the money, and up to two things going wrong under the surface. The game builds the whole family on day one, names, faces, habits, secrets, and then life happens to them. Announcements. Hospitals. Weddings. Babies. Funerals. Moves. Breakups. Family meetings. Birthdays, custody weekends, road trips, parent-teacher night, and a Sunday dinner every week whether anyone’s speaking or not. Years can pass. Kids grow up. You get old. The town has its own people: the hardware-store family across the street with two brothers who haven’t spoken in ten years, the diner on the lake, the bowling alley, the bar, the church, the realtor with a number for everything. Your family lives among them, works for them, dates into them. But they’re not yours. Yours are the ones you built. Everybody at your table is carrying something. It’s a family life simulator. It is not a quiet one.