ABOUT

About this game

Why this game was made

From 1845 to 1852, the potato crop in Ireland failed again and again. About a million people died, and more than a million left the island. In Irish, this time is called An Gorta Mór, "the Great Hunger."

The game was first written in Chinese, for readers to whom this history is almost unknown. It asks you to live through these years from inside an ordinary family: sharing out food, seeing people off, writing letters, keeping wakes. Every person who dies has a name.

The title is the line we imagine was most common in the letters sent overseas, and the hardest to read: all is well at home.

This is not a game you can "win"

The number who survive does not become a score, and there are no winners. Many outcomes depend not on how well you choose, but on which county and what kind of family you were born into. This echoes what historians have found: the deaths were concentrated in the west, and among those with no land.

Every choice in the game is a dilemma people really faced at the time. We hope you won't treat it as a puzzle to be solved.

Where the history comes from

Every figure in the game has a source, listed under "Sources and figures."
The records and each year's facts all carry sources. We keep checking line by line; claims without a reliable source are rewritten or removed, and mistakes may still remain.
Your family and the individual events they meet are fictional. They are drawn from the conditions of the time, but have no direct record behind them.
Anything marked "game setting" is an estimate based on historical descriptions, not a measured figure.
Captain Kennedy, Major Mahon, Asenath Nicholson and others are real people. Their lives follow the historical record, but their encounters with you are fictional.
We are not experts in Irish history. If you find a mistake, or feel something is handled badly, please tell us; we will check it and correct it.

Report a mistake or send feedback

Free to play, and donations

This game is free. You can play all of it without donating.

If you choose to donate, you are supporting the author in continuing to make this game; it is not a gift made directly to any organisation. The author personally promises that 25% of what is received (after payment-processing fees) will be donated in the author's own name to Ireland-related organisations and 25% to Irish-language associations, with the remaining 50% going to running the site and further development. The actual recipients and amounts will be published on this page.

To learn more

{1} (Dublin)
{2} (Strokestown Park, County Roscommon. The owner of this estate during the famine was the Major Mahon who appears in the game.)
{3} (County Cork)
{4} (Quebec, Canada)
Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–1849 (1962)
Christine Kinealy, This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845–52 (1994)
Cormac Ó Gráda, Black '47 and Beyond (1999)
John Crowley, William J. Smyth and Mike Murphy (eds), Atlas of the Great Irish Famine (2012)

Content note

This game depicts hunger, disease, eviction and death, including the deaths of children and family members. You don't have to play it all at once; if it gets too much, stop for a while.