Cookie Clicker

Click a cookie. Buy upgrades. Click more cookies. You'll hate yourself for how long you play this.

What it is

Cookie Clicker is the browser incremental most people mean when they say one. There is a big cookie on the left. Click it and you have one cookie. Spend cookies in the store on the right, starting with a Cursor, on things that bake cookies for you without clicking. The numbers go up, the store gets stranger, and hours pass.

How to play

Click the cookie. When you can afford the first item in the store, buy it. Keep going. The Buy and Sell toggles and the 1, 10 and 100 quantity buttons speed up shopping later. The Options menu has save and load, an export that turns your whole game into a block of text, and volume controls. Stats shows how far you have gotten. The game saves itself to your browser as you play, so you can close the tab and come back.

What makes it different

It is the original, still being updated more than a decade on. The live version sits next to a beta and a row of older versions going back to the 2013 original, so you can play the game as it was. There is a news ticker of one-line jokes, a bakery with a randomly picked name, and a language menu with fifteen options. It is also honest about what it is: the tagline on load admits that nobody wants to eat your cookies.

Why it is on Bored

It is a good second tab: it bakes while you do something else and there is always a purchase waiting when you come back. And the browser version is the original, which matters for a game this copied.