Guide

Idle game glossary

Idle games have their own small dialect. Here are the words you will meet most often, explained plainly, with examples from the games we review where they help.

Editorial team · checked at the source27 October 2026

Terms are grouped loosely from the first minutes of play to the deep end. You do not need any of them to start playing; they simply make reviews, wikis and community advice easier to follow.

The first few minutes

Idle game: A game where progress continues with little or no input from you. You make decisions, then let time do the work.
Incremental game: A wider family in which numbers grow and each increase opens new options. Not every incremental game is idle; some, like Candy Box 2 and A Dark Room, become adventures.
Clicker: An idle or incremental game that starts with clicking a single thing by hand, such as the big cookie in Cookie Clicker. The clicking usually matters less as automation grows.
Generator: Anything that produces a resource on its own: a grandma baking cookies, a field growing catnip, an antimatter dimension producing antimatter.
Rate: How fast a resource grows, usually shown per second. Most decisions in an idle game come down to raising a rate.
Multiplier: An upgrade that multiplies a rate instead of adding to it. Multipliers are why numbers in idle games eventually become enormous.

The middle stretch

Active play: Doing things by hand for faster progress: clicking, managing jobs, timing purchases. Many games reward it early and need it less later.
Idle play: Letting the game run while you do something else. Some games progress only in an open tab; others continue while closed.
Offline progress: Progress calculated for the time the game was closed. Melvor Idle lists it as a feature, and Trimps catches up on time away when it loads.
Autobuyer: A feature that buys upgrades or generators for you. Usually earned rather than given at the start.
Automation: The broader idea of the game playing itself. Antimatter Dimensions takes it furthest, with a scripting language for its later stages.
Storage cap: A limit on how much of a resource you can hold. Kittens Game uses caps to make you plan buildings carefully.
Soft cap: A point past which a bonus keeps growing, but much more slowly. Common in long games to keep numbers from running away.
Notation: How very large numbers are written: scientific notation (1.5e30), letter suffixes, or named numbers like quintillion. Many games let you choose in the options.

The deep end

Prestige: Resetting your progress on purpose in exchange for a permanent bonus that makes the next run faster. Cookie Clicker calls it ascending, Trimps uses a Portal, Antimatter Dimensions has Infinity and more beyond it.
Run: The stretch of play between two prestige resets.
Layer: A prestige level with its own currency and upgrades. When one reset sits on top of another, players talk about the game having several layers.
Challenge: A run played under special rules, usually harder, for a reward. Trimps, according to its Steam page, has more than 50.
Achievement: A recorded milestone. In some games achievements also give small bonuses, which makes them worth chasing.
Endgame: The latest content a game currently has. In open-ended games it moves with every update.

Saves and versions

Autosave: The game saves by itself at intervals. Useful, but it usually saves only in the browser you are using.
Export and import: Copying your save as a block of text, then pasting it back later or into another browser. Kittens Game and Trimps both offer it.
Hard reset: Deleting your save completely to start from zero, unlike a prestige reset, which keeps some progress. Games usually ask for confirmation, for good reason.
Cloud save: A save stored on an account rather than in one browser, so it can follow you between devices.
Demo: A free version with part of the content. Melvor Idle's demo has fewer skills than the full version.
Early Access: A paid release that is still in development. The Steam version of Kittens Game is listed this way.

A last word on words

Communities around each game invent their own slang on top of these terms, and wikis tend to assume you know it. If a guide loses you, look for its definitions page, or simply play a little further: most idle games introduce their ideas one at a time, and the vocabulary makes much more sense once you have met the thing it names. For help choosing where to start, see How to choose an idle game.