About

About Quidsmith

Quidsmith is a free, independent browser game about a lifetime of money. You steer one person from age 25 to 100, making the financial decisions a life throws at you, and try to reach the end without ever running your current account to zero.

What it is

It is a UK personal-finance life simulation. Each year you allocate your income across the real products people actually use, an emergency fund, ISAs and a Lifetime ISA, workplace and personal pensions, gilts, a global tracker and individual shares, Premium Bonds, gold and crypto, a home and buy-to-let property, then annuities and equity release later in life. Between decisions the game throws the unexpected at you, from a boiler failure to a redundancy, and your wellbeing and late-life care needs shape how the story ends. Reach 100 and your final net worth and Life Score set your ending tier.

How the model works, at a high level

Under the surface is a simplified but grounded UK economy. Inflation, the base rate, wages and property prices evolve each year, and every asset responds in a plausible way: cash barely keeps pace with prices, gilts pay a steady real return, equities grow faster but swing harder, and leverage on property cuts both ways. Tax wrappers behave like their real counterparts, so an ISA shelters growth, a pension adds tax relief up front at the cost of access before 57, and the Lifetime ISA carries its 25% bonus and its 25% early-withdrawal charge. The numbers are illustrative and the rules are streamlined for play, but the shape of the trade-offs is real. The guides explain each corner of the model in plain English.

Who builds it, and why

Quidsmith is made and run by Callum McIntosh, a solo developer and personal-finance geek based in Edinburgh. It grew out of a real interest that started in 2013 after some early-twenties debt, lived for years as a tangle of spreadsheets, became a rough web game nobody played, and was rebuilt from scratch as Quidsmith in 2026. It is a hobby project first: a way to stress-test money plans by living a hundred simulated years in an afternoon. Much of the thinking behind it draws on the UK personal-finance community, in particular the UK Personal Finance and FIRE UK subreddits and MoneySavingExpert.

Free and independent

The game is free to play and carries no paywall. It is an independent project, not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by any financial institution, government body or product named within it. Real product names are used only to identify the real-world things the game models and remain the trademarks of their owners. If you would like to help keep it running you can support it on Ko-fi, but nothing is gated behind doing so.