Dust Years

You guide a farm family through the Dust Bowl years, one season at a time. Each season you choose an action from a deck, weighing its effect on money and morale against the next drought or debt that's coming. Time your use of relief well and keep the family solvent and together to survive the run.

• Money and morale are ledgers you must keep from bottoming out
• Each season plays a card with trade-offs to weigh
• Relief helps most when timed for the worst seasons

• Desktop: click to choose each season's action (number keys also work), New Run to restart
• Phone & tablet: tap the on-screen action buttons, fully touch-friendly

• Difficulty: Easy, Normal or Hard
• Daily shared run or endless Practice

• Don't let either ledger hit zero, a balanced family outlasts a rich, miserable one
• Hold relief for the harshest seasons rather than spending it early
• Read the deck ahead and brace the family before debt and drought stack up

Dust Years is a survival game about endurance and hard choices on a struggling farm in the New Deal era, teaching the Depression first-hand.

• Skills: the Great Depression, the New Deal, historical decision-making, cause and effect
• Best for: roughly grades 6–11 (ages 11–16)
• For parents & teachers: the Depression era through hard, human choices.

Guiding a farm family season by season, weighing money against morale against the next drought, is the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

Tracking morale alongside money is the original pairing.

Both are needed to explain what happened. The disaster was agricultural and economic at once — drought met farming practices that had stripped the plains of the grass holding the soil — and the decision to stay or leave was rarely settled by arithmetic alone.

Dust Years is an original history survival game about endurance, hard choices and the New Deal era on a struggling farm. It's free to play in your browser.

A free, original browser game on PlayPendium. No download, no install.