Fallowborn is out — roleplay a humble peasant with delusions of a crown
July 21, 2026 · Fallowborn devlog
Most grand-strategy games hand you a crown on turn one. Fallowborn hands you a barley field, a lord who owns your Sundays, and a winter with teeth. You're a serf in 867 AD. Whether the family ever wears a crown is your problem — realistically, your great-great-grandchildren's.
Free, runs in a browser tab, live now. No download, no account.
You will die — that's the point
You don't play a country, you play a bloodline, one life at a time. When your character dies you carry on as the heir; if the heir is a child, you raise them. Progress is measured in funerals. The end screen reads back every life you played — years, title, and one line the chronicler should've kept to himself.
The ladder runs both ways
Serf → freeholder → gentry → baron → count → duke → king → emperor. Most games skip the bottom rungs; here you buy your own freedom before land is even a conversation. Hold a county and you play the feudal game in both directions — petition your liege, appeal over his head, or raise your banner — while your own sworn men do the same to you.
No click-fatigue
Set a focus in the Deeds tab — work the land, drill the levy, court your intended — and it runs day after day as the seasons turn. One-shot deeds are there when the moment's right; hand the dull stretches to automation and skip ahead. The world never pauses: ~65 sovereign realms fight their own wars and fracture along their own fault lines, from Ireland to the Urals to North Africa, redrawing the map whether you watch or not.
Why it exists
The AI boom has sent hardware prices through the roof — upgrading my aging PC to run the big strategy titles got priced clean out of reach. So I pointed the thing inflating those prices at something useful and built my own, openly with AI, on the machine I already own. If the machines are going to eat the budget, they can earn their keep.
Under the hood
Zero dependencies, no framework, no server. The ~460-county map is rasterized from real lon/lat seed points; the RNG is seeded, so a save captures the whole world exactly. The entire world — map, realms, events, cultures, balance — is plain data, and you can import a total-conversion mod as JSON from the Mods menu without touching a file. Runs from file://. Runs on your phone.
The honest bits
Made openly with AI assistance, by one person. Free, and it stays free — tips are welcome, never expected. Source is on GitHub under a noncommercial license; if a rank comes too fast or a tooltip lies to you, open an issue. Old hardware is a target, not an afterthought — “it chugs on my 2012 phone” is genuinely useful.
You start with nothing. So did everyone in 867. Go see how far the name gets.
Source: GitHub · argue about balance: Discord · keep the barley free: Ko-fi