Arcade WhaleAn idle game is a game that keeps going when you stop playing it. You plant something, hire someone or build a machine, and the numbers keep climbing while you answer an email. The best ones give you a decision every time you come back, so the few seconds you spend on them actually matter.
They are also the games that suit a browser tab best. A tab can sit in the background all day, it costs nothing to open, and there is nothing to install. We made six idle incremental games that run that way: three new ones, two planet games and an ant colony, plus Abyss Salvage, Whale Bay and Lonewatch. Each one saves on your device, each one has a goal you can actually finish, and none of them asks you to click until your wrist hurts. They differ most in one thing: how long they keep working after you leave.
Try it: when should you come back?
Every idle game has a rule for the time you were away. Some count all of it, some count a little and some count nothing. The rule decides what kind of break each game is good for, and the honest answer is rarely “any”. Move the slider to how long you will be gone and see what each game pays for.
You close the tab. How much of your time away still counts?
Move the slider to see each game.
Each bar is the time you were away. The pale part is the time the game counts, the solid part is what that time is worth at the game's away pace. Sprout Planet, Timber Planet and Ant Feast count the first 15 minutes at a third of their normal pace (Ant Feast pays coins only; the food waits). Whale Bay counts up to 2 hours at roughly a third, and only once a cashier is hired. Abyss Salvage counts up to 8 hours at half pace, and up to 24 hours after you hold 25 Pearls. Lonewatch pays a pile of salvage that fills in about half an hour, bigger the further your best run reached. These are the rules in the games, rounded; how much you earn depends on your upgrades.
The pattern is clear once you slide through it. No game pays for all of your time away at full pace, and the ones that count the longest pay the slowest. That is on purpose: if the game played itself just as well without you, there would be no reason to come back. So pick the game by the gap you have. A game that stops counting after fifteen minutes is perfect next to your work and wasted overnight, and the other way round.
1. Sprout Planet: keep it open next to your work
Sprout Planet is the calmest game on this list. A small gray planet turns in the night sky, dead from pole to pole, and your job is to make every tile green again. One tile glows when you start. Tap it and a seed pops in, a sprout pushes up, and the grass begins to creep to the tiles around it on its own. Every green tile earns seeds, and seeds buy more seeds, greenhouses and upgrades.
The decision that matters is where you plant. Grass spreads from its edge, so a new seed on the far side of the planet opens a second front and the planet fills much faster than if you keep thickening one patch. Rocks hold the grass back until you tap them apart. Greenhouses send little gardeners out with seed sacks to plant every gray tile within three steps, which is how you fill the far corners without being there. Rain clouds, bees and flowers that pay four times as much come later.
There are five planets and each one adds a new problem. Tide is mostly ocean, and grass never crosses water. Dune is sand that only takes a seed while a rain cloud keeps it wet. Rime is capped with ice that melts only where green tiles surround it, and Ember has volcanoes that rain ash on your grass until you ring them in green. Each finished planet gives golden seeds that speed everything up for good, and when all five are green a new galaxy starts with those seeds still in your pocket.
Its away rule is short: a few minutes at a slower pace. That makes Sprout Planet a game for a second monitor or a background tab you glance at between tasks. It moves while you watch, and it is lovely to watch.
2. Timber Planet: a lumber crew on tiny planets
Timber Planet is the busier sibling. A small planet is covered in forest, and a toy lumberjack in a red beanie and a plaid shirt chops at the nearest pine until it falls. Tap a tree and that is one swing of the axe, and the crew heads where you tapped. Each log goes up on a shoulder and gets carried to the cabin or the sawmill, and it only pays when it arrives. The bar at the top counts the trees still standing.
Your own tap never gets stronger. What you spend on is the crew: more lumberjacks, a sharper axe, faster walking, then a wheelbarrow, a truck and a harvester that carry more at once. Where you put the sawmill matters too, because the walk from the trees to the saw is the slowest part of the loop, and a mill on the edge of the forest earns about a third more than one far away. Trails the crew walks often wear into dirt paths that are faster to walk. Oaks heal faster than one basic axe can cut, so they need two or three lumberjacks at once or a better axe.
The forest changes from planet to planet, so the crew that cleared the last one is not always the right crew for the next. Greenwood is pines and oaks. On Riverbend the river carries your logs downstream. Frostpeak has frozen pines that need a campfire beside them and snow that slows everyone down. Redwood grows sequoias too big for any axe, so the harvester has to come, and windstorms knock trees over. Ember has lava fires that spread through the forest unless you cut a firebreak. When a planet is bare, the crew flies on by rocket, and every golden pinecone you earned makes each log worth 10% more and every axe hit harder, for good. After the fifth planet a new galaxy regrows all five forests and you keep your pinecones.
Its away rule matches Sprout Planet’s: the first fifteen minutes count at a third of the pace, and the crew really does keep chopping and hauling while you are gone. Come back after a short break and you get the coins plus the trees they felled.
3. Ant Feast: a colony that eats a picnic, then a car
Ant Feast is the idle game you will want to zoom into. A sunny picnic blanket holds a sandwich, a cookie, an apple slice and a strawberry, a small dirt mound by the edge is your nest, and a line of glossy toy ants walks out to eat all of it. Each ant climbs the food, bites off a crumb and carries it home on its back, and the crumb only pays when it reaches a nest hole. Tap the food and you take a bite yourself, and the whole line heads to the spot you tapped.
So the walk home is the thing to shorten. Once a fifth of the picnic is gone you can dig new nest holes, and a hole right beside the food cuts every trip short. Coins buy more ants, stronger jaws, faster legs and bigger loads. Some pieces are too big for one ant: a strawberry needs four to lift it whole, and a team walks it home together. Every scene also hides a prize inside the food, marked by a soft glow, and tapping above it sends the colony tunnelling toward it for crumbs worth several times more.
The scenes get absurd fast. The kitchen has a two-tier cake with a cherry that needs six ants, the kids room has toys made of hard plastic, the garage ends with a real car whose tyres come off for teams of twelve, and the backyard has a whole shed and a watermelon that needs twenty. Clearing a scene gives crowns, which make every crumb worth more for good, and after the backyard a new yard grows everything back.
Its away rule is the strict one. The food waits exactly as you left it, so nothing is eaten while you are gone, and your scouts bring back a few coins for the first fifteen minutes at a third of your income. It is a game to play with the tab in view.
4. Abyss Salvage: the one to leave overnight
Abyss Salvage is the most idle game on this list. You lower a salvage rig into the deep sea and it earns on its own, online and offline, including while the browser is shut. There is nothing to click for score. Your job is to decide what the rig should be good at.
That decision is power. Your reactor hands out a small number of pips, and four systems want them: the drill that pays, the thrusters that fight the current, the hull 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, and each depth band leans on a different system, so a rig that was tuned perfectly a minute ago is suddenly wrong. When a run has given what it can, you refit the rig for Pearls, which raise everything for good. The sea floor at 40,000 metres is a real place, and reaching it completes the campaign.
Its away rule is the longest: up to eight hours at half pace, and a full day once you hold 25 Pearls. Set the rig up before bed and there is a haul waiting in the morning.
5. Whale Bay: the lunch break one
Whale Bay is an idle aquarium tycoon in cheerful low-poly 3D, and the idle game where you can actually see the money. You run a small seaside boardwalk with one sardine tank 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 the tanks they like. The cash lands on the ground in piles, and walking over a pile to collect it never gets old.
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. Seven tanks lead from sardines through jellyfish, mantas, turtles and sharks to the whale lagoon. After the whale arrives you can start a new season, and every season multiplies all future income by 1.5.
Hire the cashier before you leave. With one, the park keeps earning for up to two hours while you are away. Without one, it earns nothing, and if nobody feeds the sharks and the whale, they barely earn either.
6. Lonewatch: idle defence for a coffee break
Lonewatch is for the idle player who wants something to think about. Your keep is a ring with six gates, attackers come from every side, and your one watcher and your emplacements shoot on their own. You never aim. The only question is which gate you are not standing at, because walking from gate to gate takes a little over a second and a runner reaches the wall in under three.
Between waves you spend salvage on three tools that answer different attackers. A Gun splashes across a pack but cannot hurt armour, a Lance hits hard and far enough to reach a siege engine, and a Press only works at the mouth of the gate but ignores armour completely. Building the same thing at all six gates is the quickest way to lose.
The ring does not fight while you are away. What it does is save you a pile of salvage, bigger the further your best run reached, and that pile is full after about half an hour. Hold a good wave, take a coffee break, and start the next ring with a head start.
Which idle game for which break
| Game | What you do | While you are away | The goal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sprout Planet | Plant seeds, place greenhouses | A few minutes, a third of the pace | Five green planets, then a new galaxy |
| Timber Planet | Steer a lumber crew, place the sawmill | A few minutes, a third of the pace | Five cleared planets, then a new galaxy |
| Ant Feast | Tap food, dig nest holes, send teams | A few minutes of coins, the food waits | Five eaten scenes, then a new yard |
| Abyss Salvage | Split reactor power between four systems | Up to 8 hours at half pace | The sea floor at 40,000 m |
| Whale Bay | Fish, stock tanks, hire staff | Up to 2 hours with a cashier | The whale lagoon, then seasons |
| Lonewatch | Pick a gate, build the right tool | A salvage pile, full in about 30 min | Your best wave |
Getting the most out of a browser idle game
Use a normal window, not a private one. Every game here saves in your browser, and a private window forgets everything when you close it. The same goes for clearing your browsing data for the site.
Leave it one tab. Two tabs of the same idle game can fight over the same save. Pick one, and mute it if you are at work.
Spend before you leave, not after. The away rules above count what your setup earns, so the moment to buy the cashier, the extra gardener, the new nest hole or the bigger drill is right before you close the tab.
Save up for the thing that pays back fastest. The cheapest upgrade feels productive and usually is not. If you want to see how big that difference is, our Cookie Clicker post has a simulator that plays out an hour of three buying habits side by side.
All six games open in a browser on a computer, a Chromebook or a phone, with no download and no account. If you want more of the same, every idle game we make lands on the idle games page first.
