Arcade Whale
Cookie Clicker is the game that made “number goes up” into a genre. Orteil released it in 2013 as a page you open in a browser: you click a big cookie, spend the cookies on cursors and grandmas that bake for you, and before long the cookies pour in faster than you could ever click. It is still free to play in a browser, and plenty of people have a tab of it open right now.
So this list is not about where to play Cookie Clicker. It is for the moment after: when you have ascended a few times, the numbers stopped meaning anything, and you want the same pull with a different toy. We made three idle games that share its best parts, from income that keeps running while you are away to a reset that makes the next run faster. All three open in a normal browser tab and save on your device. None of them is the official Cookie Clicker.
First, the question every idle player argues about.
Try it: what should you buy first?
Every idle game is one decision repeated thousands of times: spend now, or save for something better? The simulator below uses the starting prices and output of Cookie Clicker’s first five buildings. A Cursor costs 15 cookies and bakes 0.1 per second, a Grandma 100 and 1, a Farm 1,100 and 8, a Mine 12,000 and 47, a Factory 130,000 and 260, and each one you buy makes the next of that kind 15% more expensive. Pick a buying habit and the simulator plays the first hour for you, second by second.
One hour of Cookie Clicker buildings, three ways
Pick a habit and press Play the hour.
A simple model: you start with nothing, your own clicking adds 1 cookie per second, and whatever the habit says to buy is bought the moment you can afford it. Best payback looks at each building's price divided by the cookies per second it adds, plus the seconds you would still have to wait for it, and picks the lowest. Upgrades, golden cookies and faster clicking are left out, so the real game moves faster than this.
Buying the cheapest thing feels productive because something happens every few seconds, and that is exactly the trap. Cursors and Grandmas get 15% dearer with every purchase, so after a while you are paying a lot for very little. One of everything is slow at the start because it buys a 12,000 cookie Mine long before it can really afford it. Best payback wins because it is willing to wait: it saves up for whichever building will earn its price back soonest, even if that means a minute of buying nothing. Every game below rewards that same patience.
1. Abyss Salvage: the closest one
Abyss Salvage is an idle game about lowering a salvage rig into the deep sea and letting it earn while you get on with something else. There is nothing to click for score and no reflexes involved. The drill runs on its own, online and offline, including while the browser is shut, and your job is to decide what the rig should be good at. That is the Cookie Clicker loop with the clicking taken out and the choices turned up.
The choice is power. Your reactor hands out a small number of pips, and four systems want them: the Drill Array that pays, the Thrusters that fight the current, the Hull Plating that holds back the pressure and the Floodlights, because in dark water you cannot salvage what you cannot see. There are never enough pips for all four. Each depth band leans on a different system, too. The kelp reef wants thrust, the twilight zone wants light, the midnight zone starts eating your hull, so a rig that was perfectly tuned a minute ago is suddenly wrong.
When a run has given what it can, you refit: the rig is scrapped for Pearls, which permanently raise your income and every module, so the next rig starts stronger and dives deeper. If ascending for heavenly chips is your favourite part of Cookie Clicker, this is that moment. Unlike a number that climbs forever, the sea floor is a real place at 40,000 metres, and reaching it completes the campaign.
2. Whale Bay: an idle game you walk around in
Whale Bay is an idle aquarium tycoon in cheerful low-poly 3D, and it scratches a different itch: you can see the money. You are the keeper of a small seaside boardwalk with one sardine tank, an empty ticket booth and a fishing pier. Stand at the pier and fish leap into the basket on your back, walk to an empty tank and they pour in, and living tanks pull in visitors who pay for tickets and tip at every tank they like. All of it lands on the ground as stacks of bills, and walking over a pile to hoover it up never stops being satisfying.
The idle part comes from hiring. A cashier sells tickets without you, a feeder keeps the tanks fed and a fisher stocks new tanks on his own. With a cashier hired, the park earns offline for up to two hours while you are away. Seven tanks lead from sardines and clownfish through jellyfish, mantas, turtles and sharks to the whale lagoon, and the order you build in is your call: automate first, add a species or pay to open a whole new wing.
After the whale arrives you can start a new season. The park resets, but every season multiplies all future income by 1.5, forever, which is the prestige reset in its simplest form.
3. Lonewatch: idle defence with one hard decision
Lonewatch is for the Cookie Clicker player who wants a bit more to think about. It is an idle base defence: your keep is a ring with six gates, attackers come from every side, and your one watcher and your emplacements fire on their own. You never aim. The only question is which gate you are not standing at, because walking from one gate to the next takes a little over a second and a runner crosses from the rim to the wall in under three.
Between waves you spend salvage, and the three tools answer different attackers. A Gun splashes across a whole pack but cannot get through armour. A Lance hits once and hard, far enough to reach siege engines that park outside every other weapon’s range. A Press only works at the mouth of the gate but ignores armour completely. Building the same thing on all six gates is the fastest way to lose, which is the same lesson the simulator teaches: the cheapest repeat purchase is rarely the right one.
The idle part is in coming back. Once you have held a wave, returning hands you a pile of salvage for the time you were gone, bigger the further your best run reached.
How to play idle games without getting bored
- Buy by payback, not by price. Divide what something costs by the income it adds. The lowest number wins, even if you have to wait for it.
- Fix the weakest link. In Abyss Salvage the Power tab names the system the current depth is straining. Feed that one, and give the rest to the Drill.
- Automate before you expand. In Whale Bay a cashier both frees your hands and switches on offline income, so it usually beats a new tank.
- Reset sooner than feels right. A prestige reset hurts for a minute and then pays for the rest of the game. When a run slows to a crawl, that is the time.
- Close the tab. Idle games are built for coming back. Abyss Salvage keeps working with the browser shut.
All of our idle games are on the Idle page. If you would rather manage a shop by hand than watch it run, try Fixworks, a repair shop played one working day at a time. And if a run-and-upgrade loop is your favourite part, our guide to roguelike vs roguelite explains why the next run always feels better than the last.
