Universal Paperclips™

Universal Paperclips™ starts from a tiny clicker loop and quietly turns into an automation and resource-management game about scaling up production until every part of the system is feeding the next one. By our assessment, that transformation is its real trick: it begins as a joke about office supplies and becomes a surprisingly sharp incremental game about compounding. The downside is that it is deliberately abstract and can feel sparse if someone wants story, animation, or a lot of surface variety. In practice the appeal is watching a few plain actions snowball into automation, then into constant optimization and planning. It sits near the top of the incremental genre because it does so much with so little, and because the shift in scale is easy to feel. Universal Paperclips™ is for people who enjoy systems growing beyond the original button they started with.