Incremental game

A game centered on repeatedly performing actions to accumulate resources, often unlocking upgrades that automate or accelerate further progress.

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Clicker game: A game in which repeated clicking or tapping generates resources, often alongside upgrades and automation. Clicking is the simplest direct-action loop used by many incremental games.
Progress Quest: A 2002 satirical computer role-playing game that advances its character largely without player input. Its deliberately hands-off progression anticipated the appeal of games that play themselves.
Game loop: A repeating sequence of actions and feedback that structures a game's moment-to-moment play. The resource-action-reward cycle is the basic loop repeated and expanded here.
Realm Grinder: An incremental strategy game in which players choose factions and develop increasingly powerful production systems. Its faction choices add strategic direction to repeated resource growth.
Roguelike: A role-playing game associated with procedurally generated dungeons, turn-based play, and character death that ends a run. Roguelikes center risky runs and tactical decisions rather than persistent accumulation.
Prestige (video games): A progression mechanic that resets some progress in exchange for a lasting bonus or new resource. Prestige converts a temporary reset into faster progress on the next run.
Cow Clicker: A 2010 social game by Ian Bogost that satirized repetitive clicking and social-game design. Its parody of clicking loops helped make the form itself a subject of discussion.
Progression system: A game structure through which abilities, resources, or challenges change over time. Incremental games make numerical progression their central form of play.
Universal Paperclips: A browser-based incremental game about automating the production of paperclips and expanding toward a cosmic scale. It uses successive production goals to turn a simple loop into a systems narrative.
Role-playing game: A game genre in which players develop characters through abilities, choices, and experiences in a fictional world. Incremental games borrow character growth while making accumulation itself the main activity.