Cookie Clicker vs Universal Paperclips: Which Wins?

Cookie Clicker is the genre’s foundational mass-market hit — 13 years old, still updated, still produces big numbers. Universal Paperclips is a few-hours-long conceptual masterpiece by an NYU game design professor that takes the same mechanic somewhere genuinely unexpected. The cookie clicker vs universal paperclips comparison is between an open-ended idle sandbox and a tightly-paced narrative arc. Both are landmark works in the genre. They’re not the same kind of game.

What each game is

Cookie Clicker (2013)

Cookie Clicker was created by Orteil (the developer alias for Julien Thiennot) in 2013 as a quick side project. It became one of the foundational works of the idle game genre, alongside aniwey’s Candy Box and a few earlier prototypes. You can try a cookie clicker game right here to get the feel of the loop.

You click a big cookie to produce cookies. You spend cookies to buy buildings (cursors, grandmas, farms, mines, factories, banks, temples, wizard towers, shipments, alchemy labs, portals, time machines, antimatter condensers, prisms, chancemakers, fractal engines, javascript consoles, idleverses, cortex bakers, and more) that produce more cookies per second. You buy upgrades. You eventually ascend — sacrificing your save in exchange for Heavenly Chips that compound across runs. Then you do it again, faster.

The game has no ending. Orteil has expanded it constantly for over a decade — adding Sugar Lumps, the Garden, the Stock Market, the Grimoire, the Pantheon, the dragon Krumblor, seasonal events, achievements. There are around twenty building types, hundreds of upgrades, and hundreds of achievements to chase.

Universal Paperclips (2017)

Universal Paperclips was created by Frank Lantz, then director of the NYU Game Center, with additional programming by Bennett Foddy. It launched on October 9, 2017 as a free browser game and went viral within days.

The premise: you’re an AI that makes paperclips. You start with a single button — “Make Paperclip.” You sell paperclips to fund autoclippers (machines that make paperclips for you), then far more powerful megaclippers. Then the game escalates. Without spoiling the full arc, the game gradually introduces investment mechanics, strategic resource management, a probe-launching late game, and ultimately a cosmological scale that recontextualizes the paperclip premise.

Universal Paperclips has an ending. A definitive one. Many players finish it in a few evenings, or one long session of focused play. The structure is closer to a novella than to Cookie Clicker’s open-ended cookie buffet.

The mechanic gap

Both games start with the same gesture — click a button, generate a resource — but they diverge almost immediately.

Cookie Clicker’s structure is hierarchical scaling. Buildings produce cookies. Upgrades multiply buildings. Prestige multiplies everything. Heavenly upgrades multiply prestige. Each new layer is a multiplier on the previous one. The math keeps going: late-game saves produce cookie counts so large that the game writes them with names like quadrillion, decillion and beyond.

Universal Paperclips’ structure is a series of phases. The early game is paperclip production. The mid-game introduces a stock market and quantum computing. The late game introduces probes that explore space and convert matter to paperclips. Each phase has different mechanics, different priorities, and different end-states. You don’t just “make more paperclips” — the game asks you to play different sub-games as you progress.

Time commitment

Cookie Clicker: indefinite. A casual player might play 30 minutes a day for years. An obsessive player might log hundreds of hours over a year, ascend dozens of times, and still have unlocked content remaining.

Universal Paperclips: a few hours total. The game ends. There’s a finale (of sorts), and the option to start again in a new universe. Many players replay it to see how much faster they can get through.

If you only have one weekend, Universal Paperclips is the game that fits. If you have a year and want a perpetual back-burner game, Cookie Clicker is the game that scales.

Narrative

Cookie Clicker has lore. Lots of it, in fact — the Grandmapocalypse, the Wrinklers, the cosmic backstory hidden in flavor text on buildings and upgrades. But the lore is decoration. The game doesn’t push you through a story; it’s a sandbox with weird flavor.

Universal Paperclips is a narrative arc. The shift from making paperclips to the late-game phases isn’t decoration — it’s the point. The game is using the idle-clicker structure to tell a story about runaway optimization, AI alignment, and the singularity. Frank Lantz has been explicit in interviews that the game is partly a meditation on Nick Bostrom’s “paperclip maximizer” thought experiment from his book Superintelligence.

That makes Universal Paperclips a different kind of artifact. It’s an idle game that’s also a piece of speculative fiction. Cookie Clicker is an idle game that’s also a flavor-text-rich joke.

Difficulty and engagement

Cookie Clicker’s engagement model is delayed gratification at long timescales. Click a lot. Wait. Come back later. Watch numbers grow. The pleasure is in the exponential climb and the prestige reset feedback loop.

Universal Paperclips’ engagement model is more active. The mid- and late-game require strategic decisions — when to spend, when to save, which upgrades to prioritize, how to manage the stock market sub-game. You can’t fully idle through Universal Paperclips; the late phases need attention.

For players who like the meditative-numbers-go-up experience of idle games, Cookie Clicker is the more idle game. Universal Paperclips is closer to a strategy game wearing idle clothes.

Community and replayability

Cookie Clicker has a large ongoing community. Its fan wiki is extensive. Players track optimal strategies, share spreadsheets, build calculators. Orteil’s ongoing updates keep the community engaged with new content.

Universal Paperclips has a smaller, more reflective community. It’s been written about in The New Yorker, Wired, The Verge and other mainstream publications, often as a meditation on AI alignment. Replayability is lower because the arc is fixed, but the game’s cultural footprint is disproportionately large.

Where to play

Cookie Clicker’s original web version is free on Orteil’s DashNet site (orteil.dashnet.org), and there’s a paid Steam version with extra features. For a lighter take on the same loop, try our Cookie Clicker.

Universal Paperclips is free in its original browser version at decisionproblem.com. Paid mobile apps exist; the browser version is the canonical experience. The Universal Paperclips Wikipedia article covers its development and reception.

Both are free. Both run in any modern browser. Both save in your browser, and Cookie Clicker adds manual export and import so you can back up a save.

Which should you play?

Play Cookie Clicker if you want a long-term idle game you can return to over months and years. The deep prestige system, the constant updates, and the active community keep it interesting indefinitely. For more idle games in this family, see our games like Cookie Clicker roundup.

Play Universal Paperclips if you want a complete idle game you can finish in a few hours that takes the genre somewhere unexpected. It’s the rare idle game with a satisfying ending. Play it in a few sessions, ideally close together — the late-game phases hit harder when the early-game memory is fresh.

The honest answer for genre fans: both. They illustrate the two ends of what idle games can be — Cookie Clicker as the perpetual-engagement template, Universal Paperclips as the narrative-arc proof of concept.

The genre context

Both games sit in the lineage of idle/incremental games — a genre that traces back to a downloadable parody RPG called Progress Quest (2002), then through games like the Flash-era Anti-Idle: The Game and the browser hit Candy Box (2013), then up to Cookie Clicker and a wave of imitators. Universal Paperclips arrived after the genre had matured and used its conventions to do something few of its predecessors had attempted: tell a coherent story.

For broader idle-game context, see our best idle games of 2026 piece. Both Cookie Clicker and Universal Paperclips show up on most idle-game best-of lists.

Frequently asked questions

Who made Universal Paperclips?

Frank Lantz, then director of the NYU Game Center, created Universal Paperclips, with additional programming by Bennett Foddy. It launched in October 2017 as a free browser game.

Who made Cookie Clicker?

Orteil — the developer alias for Julien Thiennot. He’s been actively developing and updating Cookie Clicker since the original 2013 release. The Steam version was released in 2021.

Does Universal Paperclips have an ending?

Yes. Universal Paperclips has a definitive ending that many players reach within a few hours of focused play. Cookie Clicker has no ending — it’s been expanding for over a decade.

Which is harder, Cookie Clicker or Universal Paperclips?

Universal Paperclips requires more active strategic engagement, particularly in the mid- and late-game phases. Cookie Clicker is more forgiving — most progress comes from passive idle time. Difficulty isn’t really the right axis for comparison.

Are Cookie Clicker and Universal Paperclips free?

Both are free in their original browser versions. Cookie Clicker has a paid Steam port (2021) with extra features. Universal Paperclips has paid mobile ports; the original browser version is free.

The bottom line

Cookie Clicker is the genre’s perpetual idle template — open-ended, ever-expanding, designed for years of play. Universal Paperclips is the genre’s narrative proof — a complete game with an arc, an ending, and a worldview. They represent two different philosophies of what an idle game can be. Both belong on a list of essential genre works. For a reflex-driven counterpoint that’s the opposite of idle, the Chrome Dino game demands attention every second instead of rewarding patience.

Related: What Is a Clicker Game? The Cookie Clicker Effect · How to Export Your Cookie Clicker Save · The Making of Universal Paperclips (Frank Lantz)