A UK personal-finance survival game
What is Quidsmith?
Quidsmith is a free browser game about not dying broke. You take one person from 25 to 100 and make every money call a lifetime can throw at them, from the first payday to the last. Get it right and you retire a legend. Get it wrong and you run out of road at 73. Most people run out of road.
Every year you get a salary, a stack of bills, and an economy that does whatever it fancies. You decide where the money goes. Inflation quietly eats your cash, interest rates keep moving the goalposts, house prices do their thing, and the market gives with one hand and takes with the other. Your pay stops at retirement, the State Pension turns up fashionably late, and you might still have forty years to fund. The first half of the game is building the pile. The second half is not blowing through it.
Reach 100 and your net worth picks your ending, anywhere from scraping in by a whisker to leaving a proper legacy. Money is not the whole story, though. Look after your diet, your exercise and your social life and you live longer and score higher. Let them slide and no pile of cash will save you. Your final Life Score weighs how rich you got against how well you actually lived, and it is very hard to fake.
The products available
Quidsmith runs on the real machinery of UK money. Every year you can spread your cash across any mix of these:
- Cash ISA & savings: tax-free, instant, and going nowhere fast.
- Stocks & Shares ISA: the same investments, with the taxman locked out.
- Lifetime ISA: free 25% from the government, with a nasty charge if you grab it early.
- Workplace pension: free money from your employer, out of reach until later life.
- SIPP: your own pension, your own picks.
- State Pension: the guaranteed floor, if you live long enough to collect it.
- Gilts: government bonds. Dull, dependable, and quietly useful.
- Global ETF: the whole world in one holding, and the long-run engine of the game.
- Individual stocks: back your hunches, wear the consequences.
- Premium Bonds: no interest, just a monthly lottery, stake never at risk.
- Gold: the classic panic hedge that pays you nothing to hold it.
- Crypto: a thrill on the way up, a bloodbath on the way down.
- Property: a roof over your head that quietly builds equity.
- Buy-to-let: be a landlord, chase the yield, cop the costs.
- Annuities: trade a lump sum for an income that never runs out.
- Equity release: turn your house into cash now, and settle up from the estate later.
How a run plays out
No life runs in a straight line. In between your careful plans, the game lobs the unexpected at you. The boiler dies in January. The car gives up on the motorway. Redundancy lands, or a windfall drops out of nowhere. Skip the emergency fund and one bit of bad luck becomes a fire sale at the worst possible moment, which is exactly why the smart early game is boring on purpose: build the buffer first, chase the growth later. Push on into old age and your health starts to matter, and from your eighties the odds of a big care bill climb fast. Plan for it and the house passes on intact. Ignore it and the house becomes the cash machine of last resort. Win or lose, no two lives play out the same.
See it in action
Guides & articles
Plain-English guides to every play style and every corner of the model, with charts that show why the numbers do what they do.
How to play Quidsmith
The complete guide: the goal, the yearly loop, every product, and how to win.
ISA or pension?
Where your money works hardest, and why tax relief tips the balance.
Why a gilt and Global ETF mix works
How two simple assets combine into a resilient core portfolio.
Saving a first home deposit
A deadline changes everything about where you keep the money.
Pensions explained
Workplace, SIPP and State Pension, and the tax relief that powers them.
Three play styles, reviewed
Cautious, balanced and aggressive, and where each one tends to finish.
Drawing down from 60 to 100
Making the pot last through forty years without a salary.
The emergency fund
Why a buffer is the first move, before any investing.
Beating inflation
Why safe-feeling cash quietly loses value, and what actually grows.
Late-life care
Planning for care costs so the house stays a home, not a cash machine.
Browse all guides and articles →