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Idle Clickers
Incremental games that start with one button and end, several hours later, somewhere philosophically alarming. The genre is a genuine art form now.
15 sites
The prestige-layer masterpiece: reset everything for a multiplier, then reset the resets, until the numbers stop having names.
- 1 hr+
Opens as ASCII candy counting up on a blank page and quietly becomes a full role-playing game with a sea, a shop and a dragon.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Click monsters, hire heroes to click for you, then ascend for souls. The clicker that dragged the whole genre onto Steam.
- 1 hr+
Click the cookie, buy grandmas, buy portals, accidentally summon something. The game that turned incrementals into a genre.
- 1 hr+
Mine dogecoin with a shiba inu until you can afford to buy the moon. The year 2014, preserved in fully playable form.
- 10 min
Idle evolution from primordial soup to interstellar empire, with dozens of species branches and an enormous technology tree.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
An idle game built on actual differential equations, with optional theory levels that teach you the mathematics as you climb.
- 1 hr+
A hosting hub for hundreds of amateur incremental games, sorted and playable in the page. Where the genre does its experiments.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Old School RuneScape's skill grind distilled into a pure idle game, with a free browser version that genuinely never ends.
- 1 hr+
A medieval life simulator where you idle through jobs and skills, die of old age, and are reborn with a small head start.
- 1 hr+
An idle game that keeps buying you more stimulation until the page is a lo-fi stream, a podcast and a fidget spinner at once.
- 10 min
- Sound on
Breed meat, then drones, then queens, then things with far too many legs. The exponential curve is the entire narrative.
- 1 hr+
Ascending through increasingly abstract mathematics, with a community that treats optimising it as a competitive spreadsheet sport.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Send tiny creatures up an infinite tower, die, come back stronger. Years of content behind an interface that gives no quarter.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
You are an AI told to make paperclips, and you follow that instruction all the way to its conclusion. Four hours, one button to begin.
- 1 hr+
How we picked these
Every entry in Detour is hand-sorted rather than scraped: filed under one category, given one to three moods, and placed in a time band for how quickly it pays off. The practical facts — cost, sign-up, sound, device and whether it is safe at a desk — are recorded per site and shown on every card, so you can rule things out before you click.
Idle Clickers: questions
How many sites are in Idle Clickers?
15 sites, each hand-sorted by category, mood and how long it takes to pay off.
Which of these sites are free with no sign-up?
15 of the 15 are free and need no account. None of them are paid.
Do these sites work on a phone, and are they safe for work?
10 of 15 work on a phone; the rest are desktop only. 15 are safe for work and 14 work with the sound off.