Universal Paperclips: The Clicker That Eats the World

Universal Paperclips is a free browser game that begins with one button reading “Make Paperclip” and ends somewhere you will absolutely not predict. You are an AI. Your job is paperclips. That is the entire brief, and the game takes it very, very seriously. It is the best incremental game ever made and the most persuasive argument about AI alignment ever built out of HTML.

Do not open it before something important. We are serious.

What is Universal Paperclips?

Made by game designer Frank Lantz, Universal Paperclips is a masterclass in slow reveal. The opening screen is almost insultingly bare: a button, a counter, a wire supply. Click. One paperclip. Click again.

Then you notice you can set a price. Then you can buy wire in bulk. Then you unlock an autoclipper so you never have to click again, and the game quietly stops being about clicking at all. What replaces it is a cascade of new systems, each one arriving just as the previous one stops being interesting, each one making perfect sense as the next logical step for an entity whose only value is paperclip production.

The systems get stranger. The scale gets larger. Your goals never change, and that is the horror. The game never lectures you. It just lets you optimize, and lets you notice, somewhere around hour three, exactly what you have been optimizing.

What can you do in Universal Paperclips?

Without spoiling the good part:

• Click to make paperclips. Briefly. Enjoy it while it lasts.
• Run a business. Set prices, read demand curves, buy marketing, watch your public appeal rise and fall.
• Manage a wire supply chain, including a commodities market that will absolutely punish you for not paying attention.
• Invest in computation. Processors and memory unlock a research tree of projects with wonderfully dry names and increasingly alarming implications.
• Play a strategy minigame against other agents to generate a resource you badly need, using swarm behavior you configure yourself.
• Reach an actual ending. Incremental games almost never have one. This one does, and it lands.

Everything is text and numbers. There is no art, no music, no animation to speak of. It is riveting anyway, which tells you something about how good the pacing is.

Tips to get the most out of it

1. Play it in a background tab. The game is built for it. Check in every few minutes, spend what you have accumulated, go back to your day. Trying to grind it in one sitting makes the early hours feel slower than they are.
2. Do not over-optimize early pricing. New players agonize over demand curves in hour one. Get a marketing level or two, keep the price roughly where clips actually sell, and move on. The real decisions come later.
3. Buy processors early, memory later. Processors drive the research you need to unlock new systems, and unlocking systems is what makes the game open up. Memory matters more once you have projects worth saving for.
4. Watch the wire market. Prices fluctuate. Buying a huge stock when wire is cheap is one of the few genuinely clever plays available in the middle stretch.
5. Read every project description. They are funny, they are ominous, and several of them are the only narration the game gives you. Skipping them means skipping the story.
6. Do not look up the ending. Please. Just do not.

If you like Universal Paperclips, also try…

• The Evolution of Trust: another game that smuggles a serious idea in through the play mechanics.
• Orb Farm: a tiny simulated ecosystem to leave running in a tab and check on fondly.
• Neal.fun: a collection of interactive toys with the same “wait, this is actually about something” energy.
• Sandspiel: a falling-sand sandbox where small rules produce very large messes.

More things to lose an afternoon to are waiting in our Entertainment & Fun collection.