How lives are scored, graded, and titled

When a life ends, Life Like gives you three things: a numeric score, a letter grade, and a title. They're related but not the same, and the title is often the part people actually remember. Here's how each is produced.

The grade thresholds

Grades are checked from the top down, and the first one your score clears is the one you get.

The gaps are deliberately uneven. The jump from D to C is 185 points and the jump from A to S is 105, which means the top grade is not simply "keep doing what got you an A". S runs generally need a strong starting hand and good play, not one or the other.

Note the tone of the bottom grade. The Cards Were Stacked isn't scolding you — it's the game acknowledging that some lives were unwinnable from birth. That's the whole thesis of Life Like stated in four words.

What feeds the score

Your six stats at the end of the life are the core of it, but two other things matter as much:

• How long you lived. A life cut short stops accumulating. Because life expectancy varies enormously by era — 42 years in the Middle Ages against 120 in the far future — the same quality of play produces very different totals depending on when you were born.
• The shape of your stats. The game reads relationships between stats, not just their sum. A high total built entirely on wealth while happiness sits near the floor is treated as a specific kind of life, not just a decent score.

Titles are not the same as grades

Your title is chosen by a separate system. Each title has a test, and the game runs through them in order until one matches — so titles are about what happened in your life rather than how well it scored.

This is why a low-scoring run can produce a far more interesting result than a high-scoring one. Some titles trigger on catastrophes: going bankrupt earns The Spectacular Flameout ("Went big. Went bust. Went viral."). Being exiled earns The Exile. Joining a cult earns The True Believer ("Found enlightenment. Lost the deposit."). A sufficiently absurd death earns The Punchline.

Each title also carries a rarity, and the rare ones are ordered first precisely so that a life which earned something unusual gets recognised for it rather than being labelled with something generic. The system is built to reward the memorable over the merely good.

Achievements run alongside

Separately from titles, lives can unlock achievements for specific combinations — dying rich but miserable earns Money Can't Buy It, coming home from a war earns War Hero. These don't change your grade. They're a record of what you've seen across many runs, which is the other reason to keep replaying: the game has outcomes you simply won't encounter in your first dozen lives.

How to actually score higher

Three things move the number more than anything else:

• Survive. Protect health early, especially in the short eras. Every choice you don't get to make is score you don't get to earn.
• Don't tunnel on one stat. Because shape matters, a life that's strong across four stats usually beats one that maxes a single stat and abandons the rest.
• Read your hand. A choice that's correct for a dynasty birth in the present day can be the wrong one for a working-class birth in the Industrial Age. The guides on eras and place and family cover what you're working with.

And then accept that some runs were lost before you touched them. That's not a flaw in the game. It's the point of it.