Arseling to Ealdorman

How it works, and why the lives have names

Twelve questions. Five people came out of the hall with you — a spearman, a clerk, a ferryman, an alewife and a boy — and each of them can help you with exactly one question. Asking spends them: they help, and then they go.

So does being wrong. Get a question wrong and somebody leaves whether you asked for anything or not. When all five are gone the road ends, wherever you have got to.

That is the difference between this and a quiz with three lives in the corner. A life is a number you protect. A companion is a decision on every single question: this one is hard, do I burn Beornwulf's eye for it now, or save him for something worse and take my chances? Both roads end with him gone.

The five, and what each is good for

Beornwulf, the old spearman can tell you which two answers are wrong, which halves the field. Ceolred, the reeve's clerk will look at your answer before you commit and let you pick again if it is wrong. Wiglaf, the ferryman simply knows the answer — but only when the question is about somewhere, which is four of the twelve, so when to use him is the whole of him. Eadgifu, the alewife removes the answer everybody falls for. And Osgar, the boy will wear the next wrong answer so that nobody else has to; he leaves, but he leaves alive, which is the best ending anyone gets here.

The questions are real history, not a plot

Every question is about the documented ninth century — Alfred, the burhs, the Danelaw, the Burghal Hidage, the hide, the law code, the Chronicle. That is a deliberate choice and it is the honest one: this is a fan tribute, and the historical record belongs to nobody. Every answer here is checkable in a library, and each one comes with a line explaining it whether you got it right or not.

The numbers were measured, and two of them came back wrong

Three conditions were written down before the game was built. Four thousand runs per figure, against a player who knows any given answer with some probability and otherwise guesses among whatever is left on the table.

Knowledge has to matter. It does: a player who knows none of it reaches ealdorman 0% of the time, one who knows half reaches it 10.5%, one who knows seven in ten reaches it 53.8%, and one who knows nine in ten reaches it 95.9%.

Spending has to matter. At identical knowledge, a player who spends companions well reaches ealdorman 16.9% of the time; one who hoards them, 0.8%; one who burns them on the first hard question, 0.9%. Twenty times the difference with the same knowledge, which is what makes this a game rather than a quiz.

Every companion has to be worth spending. Spending only one of them, against spending nobody, lifts the ealdorman rate from 0.8% to between 1.6% and 2.5% depending on who. All five are positive. Eadgifu is the weakest of the five and is left that way rather than tuned up — removing one wrong answer is less than halving the field, and she is the one you spend when the others have gone.

Two of those three first came back failing, and both times the measuring was wrong rather than the game. The first version let the spending strategy peek at whether the player knew the answer with its own dice roll and then rolled again to answer — two separate events — so the "good" player was burning friends on questions it then knew anyway, and the result said hoarding beats spending. The second was subtler: "remove a companion and the greedy player does better" is not evidence that the companion is useless, because every spend also brings the end of the road closer. Asked properly, all five earn their place. A result that would make you change the design is the one to check hardest, not the one to act on fastest.

The skald is keeping count

He walks behind you and he does not help. At the end he names everyone who is not there any more, one at a time, with a line each about who they were — and then he makes up two lines about your run on the spot. Those two lines are assembled from what actually happened: how far you got, what it cost, and whether there is anybody in particular he wants to mention. A clean run gets told it was a clean run, because he almost never sees one.

It runs in your browser and stays there

No account, no sign-in, no network. Your run is a short code you can share; the link opens on where you got to and what it cost. There is no code on this page that could send anything anywhere — pages in this corner are forbidden to make requests at all, and a test enforces that rather than anybody remembering.

The road behind you is drawn with a 3D engine, and the five walk off it one at a time as they go, so you can see what you have left without reading a number. If your browser will not give the page a canvas they are named instead, and every question, companion and verdict is unchanged.

Argue about it in the forum

The board's forum has a room for this. Post who you lost and on which question, and be told at length that you should have spent Wiglaf earlier.

This is fan-made, and unofficial

This is an unofficial fan game inspired by The Last Kingdom — the television series and the novels of Bernard Cornwell it is based on — naming the work, its setting and its premise under nominative fair use. It is a free, unofficial fan tribute, made for fun. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Carnival Film & Television, Netflix, or Bernard Cornwell and his publishers.

The questions are about recorded history and nothing else, and the five companions are original characters written for this game — a spearman, a clerk, a ferryman, an alewife and a boy are the people who would actually have been within reach of a man on his way up, and none of them is anybody from anything. Every line of text here was written fresh for it. No dialogue, novel text, script text, scene, still, logo or artwork from any television series or book is reproduced anywhere in it. Iron Realms — the strategy game the rest of this site is about — is an original fantasy world with its own map, its own houses and its own art, and has no connection to the world of The Last Kingdom.

The rest of the corner

The Last Kingdom wing has Lord of Bebbanburg, Hold the Wall, Holmgang, The War for the Kingdoms, Saxon or Dane, the trivia rounds and the character pages. The fan tributes hub has the Westeros, Supernatural, King of the Hill and Fringe wings alongside it, and the free tools that are not about anybody's fiction. If you would rather play something with a map in it, Iron Realms is free and runs in a browser tab.