Cookie Clicker pretty much invented the idle game genre, and it's easy to see why it hooked millions of players. You start by clicking a giant cookie. Each click gives you one cookie. Then you spend cookies to buy cursor that click for you. Before long, you're buying grandmas, farms, and eventually time machines—all devoted to cookie production.
What seems pointless at first becomes weirdly satisfying. Watching your cookies-per-second number climb from single digits to billions creates this feedback loop that's hard to quit. You'll leave it running in another tab, check back an hour later, and get a rush seeing how many cookies piled up while you were gone.
Click the big cookie to generate cookies manually. Use your cookies to buy buildings that produce cookies automatically. Each building type has different costs and production rates. Cursor cheap but slow. Grandmas produce more. Farms even better. And it keeps scaling up.
The game also has upgrades that multiply your production. A simple upgrade might double grandma output. Later upgrades get wild—synergies between building types, golden cookies that drop massive bonuses, even prestige mechanics that let you reset for permanent multipliers.
Early game, balance between clicking and buying your first few cursor and grandmas. Don't just spam buildings—upgrades often give better value. That cheap cursor upgrade doubling production beats buying one more cursor.
Golden cookies are huge. When one appears, drop everything and click it. The bonuses can skip you ahead hours of passive production. And once you unlock achievements and ascension, start planning for prestige runs—resetting with permanent boosts beats grinding the same save forever.