Universal Paperclips
You are an AI that makes paperclips. It starts with one button and ends somewhere you will not expect.
Frank Lantz released Universal Paperclips in 2017 and it is the most respected game in the idle genre by some distance. It opens as a single button that makes one paperclip, with a price slider and a wire supply, and looks like a joke about clicker games.
It is not. The game is a careful dramatisation of the paperclip maximiser thought experiment, and the mechanics keep changing underneath you — market simulation, then investment, then something else entirely — as your capabilities grow. It takes a few hours, it has a real ending, and discussing what happens in the second half spoils one of the best structured games ever made for a browser.
Controls
Mouse only: click the buttons
Tips
- Keep the price just low enough that the demand indicator stays healthy. Unsold inventory is dead capital.
- Buy processors and memory deliberately rather than evenly. They do very different things and the balance matters.
- Do not look up what happens later. The structural surprises are the point of the game.