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 four-hour 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 side project that he expected to last a few weeks. It became one of the foundational works of the idle game genre, alongside Anwynn’s Candy Box and a few earlier prototypes.

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) 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, dragon training, seasonal events, achievements. Hundreds of buildings exist, hundreds of upgrades, and millions of CpS milestones to chase.

Universal Paperclips (2017)

Universal Paperclips was created by Frank Lantz, the director of the NYU Game Center, and developed with Bret Victor and Everest Pipkin. It launched in October 2017 as a free browser game.

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 megaclippers (machines that make autoclippers). 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. Most players finish in four to six hours 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: a late-game Cookie Clicker save produces 10^300 cookies per second (notation is in scientific abbreviations because the numbers are too big for normal notation).

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: 4-6 hours total. The game ends. There’s a credits sequence (of sorts). Many players have replayed the game once or twice to optimize their first run.

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 massive ongoing community. The Cookie Clicker Fandom Wiki is one of the largest game wikis on the internet. 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 academic community. The game has been the subject of college courses (Lantz himself teaches at NYU and has discussed the game in class). It’s been written about in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and other mainstream publications 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 is at orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker (the original web version), and there’s a Steam version with achievements and improved performance for late-game saves.

Universal Paperclips is at decisionproblem.com/paperclips — the original free browser version. Mobile apps exist; the browser version is the canonical experience.

Both are free. Both run in any modern browser. Both autosave (paperclips uses localStorage; Cookie Clicker uses localStorage with manual import/export options).

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, four-to-six-hour idle game 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 Flash game called Progress Quest (2002), then through games like Anti-Idle: The Game and 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 none 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 rank in nearly every serious idle-game best-of list.

Frequently asked questions

Who made Universal Paperclips?

Frank Lantz (director of the NYU Game Center) created Universal Paperclips, developed with Bret Victor and Everest Pipkin. 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 most players reach in four to six 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 with achievements and optimization improvements. 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.