People often engage in episodic counterfactual thinking: simulating alternative ways in which past events might have occurred. Existing research has shown that the perceived plausibility of episodic simulations modulates judgments of regret, mood and prosocial behavior. However, knowledge about the factors influencing the perceived plausibility of episodic counterfactuals is limited or derived from studies using vignette-based hypothetical scenarios. Inspired by research on modal cognition, here we test whether counterfactual plausibility is influenced by a sampling process that prioritizes the generation of plausible alternatives. Additionally, we evaluated whether the sequential generation of episodic counterfactual simulations is associated with vividness and difficulty. Across two experiments we demonstrated that when people generate episodic counter-factual thoughts, they initially produce the most plausible and vivid mental simulations, without concurrent changes in difficulty. Our results provide support for a sampling process that prioritizes the generation of more plausible and vivid counterfactual alternatives over less difficult ones.