An Idle Game (also called "incremental game" or "clicker game") is a genre of game defined by the primary feature of its strategy: leaving the game running by itself for long periods of time. This is not necessarily the only way to win; some Idle Games allow and even reward active participation, but if you "win" one, whether there's an actual end or you just got a High Score, most of your gameplay was likely in the form of letting it run while you were asleep, at work, or otherwise not involved. Because active play isn't the primary strategy, sometimes the best 'move' is counter-intuitive — one that provides an immediate benefit to active play doesn't pay off as well in the long run during idle times as another one that has a less-noticeable immediate effect but is more effective during idle play.
Idle Games usually have a concept of buying upgrades that enhance your ability to gain points (whether active, idle, or both), yielding exponential gains that Pinball Scoring can't begin to describe. Upgrade units also tend to have theoretically infinite levels, but their increasing cost causes Diminishing Returns for Balance. More complicated Idle Games tend to have multiple currencies to make the purchasing decisions for upgrades more complex. Many Idle Games also have a prestige system that functions like a New Game+, resetting the game but providing a "prestige" currency that carries over runs to ease subsequent runs, and some take it further by having multiple levels of prestige that reset the levels below it. Some games with these features may downplay the idling gimmick by having mini-games that drive the mechanisms for scoring and\or upgrading, or just by having so many complicated upgrades that the player is constantly busy evaluating and choosing them, but if there is a concept of an escalating point total that goes up over time, it still falls under the "Idle" umbrella.
Frequently, especially on mobile platforms, the game may provide some resource that "speeds up" the process. Charging money to provide this resource or slowing down the game very early on so as to require it is, of course, utterly inconceivable to the developers.
Note that certain games have an idle mode (sometimes also called observation mode) that allows the player to sit back and watch the AI play the game. Examples of this would be Unreal Tournament and Europa Universalis.
Kongregate has a tag
for these.
Not to be confused with idol games.
Examples of Idle Games:
- AdventureQuest Dragons
- AdVenture Capitalist
- AdVenture Communist
- Alchademy
- ALTER EGO
- Animal Restaurant
- Anti-Idle: The Game
- Antimatter Dimensions
- Armory & Machine
- Armory & Machine 2
- Bar Idle
- Battleborn Tap, a companion game that can unlock rewards in the main game such as skins for characters.
- Battle Cats Rangers (now defunct)
- Best Fiends Forever, though its predecessor, Best Fiends has some idle elements as well (especially if you have an Apple Watch handy)
- Bitburner [1]
- The Burnable Garbage Day
- The Button That Ruins Everything, a spoof idle game created by Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw as part of his Dev Diary project.
- Candy box!
- Castle Cats
- Cell to Singularity: Evolution Never Ends
- Choppin Wood [2]
- Clicker Heroes
- Clicking Bad
- Cookie Clicker, which popularized the now-standard "clicker game."
- Cosmos Quest [3]
- Cow Evolution
- Crab War
- Crusaders of the Lost Idols
- Crush Crush, a cross between Dating Sim and Idle Game genres.
- A Dark Room
- Deep Town: Mining Factory
- Disco Zoo
- Dont Shoot the Puppy
- Dungeon Dogs
- The Dynas Tree
- Evolve Idle
- Endless Expansion [4]
- Eternal Senia: Hydrangea After The Rain
- Exponential Idle
- Factory idle
- Farm of Souls
- Five-Leaf Clover
- Forget Me Not: My Organic Garden
- The Game Dev Tree
- Godville
- GrindCraft
- Hollywhoot
- House Idle
- Ice Cream Stand [5]
- Idle Apocalypse
- Idle Blacksmith
- Idle Bouncer [6]
- Idle Breakout
- Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms, an implementation of the Forgotten Realms setting.
- Idle Chop
- Idle Empire
- Idle Heroes
- Idle Mine
- Idle Recruit
- idleSlime.text [7]
- Idle Skelly
- Idling To Rule The Gods: A Freeware Game on multiple platforms.
- The Incrementreeverse
- Kaguya Table
- Kittens Game [8]
- The Leveling Tree
- Logistics Inc
- The Longing: Part Idle Game, part Adventure Game
- Loot Box Quest
- Metal Slug Infinity
- Mirror Pond [9]
- My Cafe
- Neko Atsume
- NGU IDLE [10]
- Office Space: Idle Profits
- Omega Layers
- The Perfect Tower
- Pickcrafter [11]
- Pingy the Ping Idle RPG
- Plantera
- Pony Clicker [12]
- Prestige Tree
- Progress Quest, one of the earliest examples, goes further than most. All you can actually do in this "game" is create a character, and optionally join/create a guild—after that it just plays itself, auto-killing randomly-generated monsters for experience, until you quit. Intended as a satire of RPGs and Level Grinding.
- Potatoes Clicker [13]
- Reactor Idle
- Reactor Incremental [14] (not to be confused with Reactor Idle above)
- Realm Grinder [15]
- Religious Idle
- Sandcastle Builder
- Scream Collector
- Shop Heroes
- Simple Mult Idle
- Slurpy Derpy
- Soul Harvester [16]
- Space Company [17]
- Spaceplan [18]
- Spoon Pets
- Squid Ink
- Star Tap
- Swarm Simulator [19]
- Sword Fight
- Synergism
- Tamagotchi
- Tangerine Tycoon
- Tap My Katamari
- Tap Titans
- Time Clickers [20]
- Time Warpers
- Tower Attacknote
- The Tree Of Nerfs
- Trimps
- Universal Paperclips
- Universe Shrinker
- Vector Incremental
- Void Troopers
- War Clicks
- World Idle
- Zombidle
