Life Capital

Life Capital is a facilitated board simulation. Five to eight people sit at one table and play through about forty years of a life — earning, spending, investing, losing a job, having children — while a Trainer runs the session and a Banker keeps the accounts. Everything a player decides is written down in their own ledger, so at the end they can see what each decision cost. A full session takes five hours: a thirty-minute briefing, two hours of play, a break, one hour forty-five more, then thirty minutes of feedback.

The methodology was created in 2017 by a team of authors in Kharkiv, Ukraine. In 2020 it received the approval of Ukraine's Ministry of Education and Science for use in educational institutions of all levels, and became part of the National Financial Literacy Project led by the Deposit Guarantee Fund of Ukraine. More than 200 school financial-literacy clubs run on it, and the project says those clubs kept going through the war.

It reached Canada with Ukrainian newcomers. Carleton Place resident Olga Ialovenko left Ukraine with a well-worn box of the game among her few possessions, translated it into English, and began playing it with fellow émigrés; the first boxes shipped on 20 October 2025 and the first full Canadian game event was held in Kingston on 6 December 2025. The Ukrainian rights holder's tournament dossier names her as the chief organiser of the Canadian tournament, a certified senior Trainer and president of the Ukrainian Community of Lanark County — the volunteer non-profit that organises UAFest.

School tournaments feed national stages and national stages feed international ones. Vienna hosted the first international tournament in April 2024 with twelve national teams from twelve countries; Kyiv National Economic University held the Ukrainian national stage in March 2025; the first Canadian national tournament ran at Carleton University in Ottawa on 26 April 2025 with 62 teenagers from four provinces; Frankfurt followed in April 2025 with more than 160 players aged 13 to 17. The second Canadian national tournament was played in Ottawa on 14 March 2026, and the third international stage is set for Geneva on 28–31 October 2026.

Sessions run in English and Ukrainian. A school can book a 45–60 minute lesson, a club that runs through the school year or a school tournament; a company can book three to four hours for 6 to 18 people; newcomers have a two-hour starter track on a relocation budget, income and spending in a new country and the basics of tax. Trainers come out of the players: the Trainer School is a seven-hour starting training, five weekly online sessions, more than thirty webinars and twelve supervised sessions across four table roles. The site publishes no price and no age range — it says to write to info@lifecapital.ca and you get the current figure.