Playbook

Wellbeing, your Life Score and how the hiscores are ordered

Quidsmith Guides · Updated 2026-07-03 · 8 min read

Money is only one axis in Quidsmith. Running alongside it is wellbeing, built from three standing habits, and it shapes both how your life goes and how the game scores it at the end.

The three habits

Wellbeing comes from diet, exercise and community standing. They are funded as a cost-neutral carve-out of your living costs: the money is already being spent, so investing in wellbeing is a choice about where the same spending goes, not an extra bill. That makes it one of the few free improvements on the board.

Each habit is set to Low, Medium or High, and each level is worth a fixed number of wellbeing points:

Low is deliberately 25 rather than zero: ignoring wellbeing dents your score without wiping it out. Medium is the mechanically neutral setting, the one the health effect is centred on, so a player who never touches the Wellbeing tab is not being punished, just not gaining anything either.

Your score for a single year is the average of the three habits. Your lifelong wellbeing is the average of every year you lived, and every year weighs exactly the same. There is no cramming kale at 85: a decade of High cannot undo five decades of Low, because all six decades are averaged flat.

Why it matters during the game

Wellbeing is not just cosmetic. Its lifelong average feeds a subtle health effect and, importantly, lowers your chance of needing the most expensive residential care later. It even interacts with annuity pricing. Looking after yourself across the decades reduces the biggest costs of old age.

The wealth axis: graded against par

The other half of the score is wealth, and it is not your raw net worth. It is your net worth measured against a par baseline: what a disciplined but unremarkable investor would have ended up with, given your starting position.

Par is a deliberately simple, transparent heuristic. It takes your difficulty's starting lump sum and a steady 20% of your gross salary contributed every working year, and compounds both at 4% a year after inflation up to your retirement age. That is the number to beat.

Your final net worth is then converted into wealth points, with par itself worth 75 points:

Two things follow from this. First, matching a disciplined investor already earns you the top grade band, and you only need to beat par by a third to max the axis out. Second, and more importantly, par scales with your salary and your difficulty. Two players with wildly different absolute net worths can score the same wealth points, because each is being measured against their own baseline. That is what makes Life Score comparable across runs at all.

Net worth here is counted in real terms, in today's money, so decades of inflation do not flatter the number. It is also your whole position, every account, your home equity, rentals and investments, minus debts. It is not your current account balance.

The Life Score is a geometric mean

Your Life Score combines the two axes with a geometric mean: multiply wealth points by wellbeing points, then take the square root. Both axes run 0 to 100, so the Life Score does too.

The maths matters, because a geometric mean punishes imbalance in a way an ordinary average does not. A run scoring 100 on wealth and 25 on wellbeing gets a Life Score of 50, exactly the same as a thoroughly mediocre 50/50 run. Being enormously rich and neglecting everything else does not top the board, because the weak axis drags the whole result down.

The final number is graded:

The same grade scale is applied to the wealth axis on its own, which is why the endgame screen can show you a strong wealth grade sitting next to a weaker overall grade.

How the hiscores are ordered

The boards rank on Life Score first. Net worth is only a tiebreaker.

1. Higher Life Score wins.
2. If two runs have the same Life Score, the higher final net worth wins.
3. If both match exactly, neither displaces the other.

That ordering is used everywhere the game asks "which of these runs is better?", so your personal best and your position on a board can never disagree with each other. It is also the rule the server applies when it decides whether a new run replaces your existing entry: a run only takes your slot if it genuinely beats it on those two axes, in that order.

The net worth column is the same real-terms, whole-position figure described above, in today's money. It is not your cash balance, and it is not your peak: a run that hit £4m at 70 and spent down to £600k by 100 is ranked on the £600k.

One consequence is worth planning around. Because Life Score comes first and it caps at 100 per axis, a run that has already maxed both axes cannot climb any higher on the primary measure, and every further pound only helps through the tiebreaker. Chasing wealth alone is the slowest route up a board.

What counts as the same board

Runs are only ranked against runs they are genuinely comparable with. Difficulty is part of the partition, not a display filter, so an Easy run and an Ironman run are never on the same table. Weekly-challenge runs are filed on their own weekly board rather than the seasonal one, and seasons follow the UK tax year and reset each April.

Every entry on the global board is re-simulated by the server from the decisions you actually made before it is written. A board place has to be played, not claimed.