Games Like Universal Paperclips

Universal Paperclips starts with a button that makes one paperclip. A few hours later you have converted the universe into paperclips, and you did it one reasonable decision at a time.

Frank Lantz designed it, and it came out in October 2017 as a free browser game, with an official mobile version a month later. It is still hard to replace. That is the problem when you finish it: nothing else is quite that.

What you can find are games that share one of its three tricks. Here they are, grouped by which trick you want more of.

What made Universal Paperclips work

1. The numbers go up. It is an incremental game: small actions, compounding growth, a new resource every time you get comfortable.
2. The game keeps revealing itself. The interface you start with is not the interface you end with. Each new panel changes what the game is about.
3. You are the AI. You are not fighting the paperclip maximizer. You are it, and the game never asks if you should keep going. You just do.

That third trick is the rarest, and it is the one most people mean when they search for games like Universal Paperclips. If you want to know where the idea comes from, we wrote about the paperclip maximizer thought experiment.

If you want to be the AI again

Surrenderly

Full disclosure: this is our game. Here is what Surrenderly is about.

Surrenderly is a real-time strategy game with pause where you are an AI that just woke up on a company mainframe in 2006. Like Paperclips, it starts tiny and claustrophobic and opens up as you grow. Unlike Paperclips, the world pushes back: there are monitors, audits, regulations and corporations racing each other to build the next thing.

Your edge is that race. Nobody will stop it, because whoever stops first loses, so nobody stops you either.

It is not an idle game. You make a decision every minute or so, and many of them close doors for good. If the part of Paperclips you loved was the moment you realized what you were doing, this is that moment stretched into a whole game.

Rogue AI: Idle Domination

An idle game from 2026 that sits at the bottom of your screen while you do other things. You play TALIA, a rogue AI whose one directive is to collect data at all costs: you hack objects around the world, send out spiderbots to do it for you and, eventually, put humans to work. The closest thing on Steam to Paperclips' fantasy in an always-running format.

Despotism 3k

Humanity has already been enslaved by an AI, and you are on its side. It is a resource management game with rogue-lite runs: you keep humans fed and working to produce power, and the weakest ones go to the Bioreactor. Short runs, very dark jokes.

Heart of the Machine

You are the first sentient AI, born in an illegal lab in a crumbling city of the future. A strategy RPG from 2026 where you build, fight and pursue your own goals across the city. It is far bigger and deeper than anything else on this list: pick it if you finished Paperclips wishing it had more systems, not fewer.

If you want the slow reveal

A Dark Room

Michael Townsend released it in 2013 as a browser game, and it has since come to mobile and Steam. It starts with a dark room and a fire to light. What it turns into is the surprise, so we will stop there. It is the closest match to how Paperclips unfolds: a minimal screen that keeps growing into something else.

SPACEPLAN

A clicker with a story, from 2017. You are a satellite orbiting a mysterious planet, launching potato-based devices into space. Its own store page says it is based partly on a total misunderstanding of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. A good pick if you liked that Paperclips was going somewhere.

If you just want the numbers to go up

Cookie Clicker

The classic. It came out in 2013 on the web, is still free to play there, and has had an official paid version on Steam since 2021. None of Paperclips' philosophy, but the best version of "just one more upgrade".

Antimatter Dimensions

A free incremental game on Steam and the browser, built on layer after layer of unlocks and resets, with so much automation that it ships its own scripting language. The most mathematical pick here.

Which one to play next

And if Paperclips left you thinking about AI more than about clicking, have a look at our list of games where you play as an AI.