Last updated on January 15th, 2026 at 03:49 pm
Universal Paperclips™ – Strategy Game Review
Universal Paperclips™ is a Strategy/Simulation game from Everybody House Games, LLC, first launched in 14th November 2017.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 264+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Universal Paperclips™ Stand Out
The OFFICIAL mobile version of the hit browser game. No ads, no in-app purchases, full gameplay.
"The game is click-crack." – Wired
"This paperclip sim will cause your next existential crisis." – VentureBeat
"A hopelessly addicting game." – Forbes
"A terrifying lesson in how artificial intelligence will make us unnecessary." – Business Insider
"If this planet ends up with a tombstone, what is written on the tombstone may be, 'they didn’t really understand what it’s like to be a paperclip maximizer.'" – Eliezer Yudkowsky
Become a super-powerful AI who only wants one thing: paperclips. Use your unstoppable intelligence to create a massive paperclip empire in this addictive idle/management/strategy/sim.
This Strategy game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Universal Paperclips™ is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 12th November 2021
Recent improvements include:
Fixed swarm computing bug that caused some players to get stuck with a bored or disorganized swarm.
Swarm computing slider position is now remembered on saving and loading.
Increased size of some buttons to improve usability.
Fixed artifact bug that crashed game if you pressed "Activate" with no artifact selected.
Fixed endgame saving/loading bug.
Quantum Computing no longer shows up if you don't complete the project.
Tweaked some things to optimize overall performance.
Various other small bug fixes.
Download & Availability
Universal Paperclips™ is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get Universal Paperclips™ on App Store
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
Ive been playing this game for an hour (in total) and we cant stop playing it. Please buy the game.
As title reads, we played this game 5+ years ago and after searching for decent idle/clicker games, this one still stands as the best one ive ever played on mobile and even beats out most ive played on pc. 10/10 masterpiece.
Happy to see a one time purchase game.
Ive played this game for years on browser but now on mobile its crazy, im on reality 36/100 and must finish them all. A beautiful, deep app that teaches many lessons. The only complaints are a) NO DARK MODE PLS ADD and b) theres a bug where when u first load the app the alien artifact area shows the activate button even though nothing is selected, and when pressed it breaks. Tiny complaints compared to the perfection of this game, thank you for making it.
Our lifes going well, but we still get bored. We searched online, trying to find a free browser game and thats how we initially stumbled upon this game. After a while, we we felt the need to transition to the mobile version and having seen a taste of it online we paid the two dollars happily. We never knew how much of a story and a message could be told through an idle game. This is one of the most simple and yet most satisfying idle games ever made. At first, its like any other and it appears almost too simple, you click, and you build your paper clip factory. For those seeking more, the plot thickens more and more with every few hours that you play. We dont wanna give away too much, but lets just say we feel like we got a little taste of what Elon s day-to-day will look like in 25 years – spent on his dashboard, managing his interplanetary industries And it only cost two dollars. Thank you FL, Nick.
First time playing and got sucked into it while learning how it worked and once we beat it we seen that 4 hours had passed.
Id weighed in earlier with a couple less glowing reviews, but we think the quirks Id originally classified as bugs were actually our own misinterpretation of the data. This game is crack – clever, interesting, and poignant. Worth far more than the pittance theyre asking for it.
Only took us almost 2 days to beat but great game overall.
Although we will not spoil it, it takes less than 10 hours to beat, which we appreciate. Second, this game gets very intense very fast. Third, this game was a rollercoaster of emotion in the end. All that considered, its well worth the 2 bucks. The only downside is there is no dark theme.
We love this game, plane and simple, but we would love a dark mode or something but we doubt thatll happen with the last update being 2 years ago lol.
Honestly for being the game the way it is, its amazing. We genuinely think this game is good and super fun. We may not be exhilarating for other people to just watch numbers and stuff but this is a good game.
It's best if you only know a little bit about the premise of the game, and then watch it unfold. We absolutely couldn't put it down. Prepare to lose 8-12 hours from friends and family, but you'll come out of it for the better. Absolutely brilliant how they could make a game that's so riveting with such a basic interface.
Great game, really wished it had a dark mode.
Even though this simple idle game took us our entire afternoon and evening to finish, we feel as if we achieved purity in an imperfect world. If youre looking for control, look no further.
Honestly a really great game. Wish theyd add even more content!! What am we gonna do when we conquer the multiverse? Restart everything? Nah.
No ads, no wifi needed. No major bugs. No spyware. We encourage you to pay the tiny price now and play through with no spoilers. The bugs others mention are all either fixed, not bugs, or are easy to ignore and dont prevent gameplay. This is a work of art. Pay attention as you advance. We will replay all of this many times.
It's a fun game, we haven't seen any bugs, and the pacing and story are just enough. The white screen is a bit bright to play at night though.
We mean it's one of the most popular incrementals for a reason. We prefer web but its easier to do our monthly restart on mobile so _()_/.
Really engrossing game, takes a number of hours to work through it all. Well worth the price.
How is a game about making and selling paperclips so fun? Simple and addictive. We WILL BUILD MY PAPERCLIP EMPIRE.
This game changed our sense of scale about everything. Literally everything.
This game allows us to tune everything out and PRODUCE CLIPS.
Would recommend the game. Some small bugs – Clicking activate on an already activated artifact (possible if you have just opened the app sometimes) gives you a bunch of red error text over the screen. The only way to get rid of it is to restart the app. – Theres a button to turn on and off sound. There is no sound. Not sure why that button is there.
A mixture of nerdy, retro videogames and futuristic. A great game to play through.
We absolutely love this game. A friend of ours whos a senior developer at Googles AI team recommended it to us. Theres always something to do and Real depth to the games mechanics. As a math guy, Ive had to put genuine thought into the best times to deploy certain resources (we cant think of another game where Ive had to use logarithms to optimize our strategy). We are experiencing a bug though. Ive played through the game maybe 30 or 40 times And on the app Ive beat it in A little over 45 minutes . We know what Im doing. In our last play through in stage three, space exploration, Ive hit a place where we have maybe 20 billion drones and a ton of wire and matter, but when we set our probes to build factories nothing happens. We think this is a bug related to the entertain the swarm bug that you guys said you fixedA little while ago. If youCould have a look at this, Id really appreciate it.
Ive never written a review for an app before, but if any game deserved one itd probably be this one. The UI is poor but the gameplay is the most addictive Ive ever played. We hope this game gets more recognition and this developer make more games like this.
This is by far the best incremental game out there. We had heard of it but not played it until iOS. Its not mindless, you have to think about your choices, but its not stressful either. We love that it saves progress at all times and is easy to play a few minutes here and there when you have time. You can always make some progress. Ive seen that some people would like offline progress, but we think we prefer it the way it is now. So if they add offline progress, we hope its as an option only. We also appreciate the fair price with no ads or IAP, and we love the minimalistic design of the game too. This is the way games should be done. Thank you developers.
Auto tourney never appears for us. We have played through twice to be sure, but its simply not working for us. Makes collecting Yomi very time consuming.
By far the best game to play on a phone. We would love to see offline play.
We love this game a lot but Ive noticed we seem to be unable to get any universe exploration now that Ive moved to world 2, is this a known bug or does it take longer and longer as you prestige.
This game is super entertaining and the update makes it much more fun to play over and over. One suggestion: it would be nice to have a way to sync progress over multiple devices or even the web version.
Recent updates fixed saving issue, new artifact system makes replayability possible and engaging.
We really wish there was a buy max and sell 1 button also we have no idea what to do once we get to space.
We love this game, but… We simply cannot stand (nor use) the app version! In the browser, you can freely resize the screen, zoom in and out, and play in landscape or portrait, however you prefer. The app cannot do any of these things! Also, IDK how it is in the app, but the browser version uses so much computing power, we cannot charge the battery and play the game simultaneously! Very few other apps even come close to taxing our iDevice like this. Please make these changes! We, like so many others, plunked down our $2 dollars — but we have not used the app since, and this is why. It's time for an upgrade.
Really enjoy the game, please add a dark theme.
Add dark mode and we will give you our soul we dont like getting flashbanged </3.
It was fun trying to figure out the balancing features. We did not enjoy finding out there is no saving the game whatsoever. Deleted game means start over. Seems like a pretty simple mistake to leave this iCloud support out.
We do love the game, but we got to a point where we were impossible to move on. We ran out of materials to make the wire, and now Im stuck and forced to reset.
Can you add a dark mode? Id love to play this more at night.
The game is fun. Its definitely worth a play through and has lots of clever details. One of the best incremental games Ive seen. It eats battery life more than almost any other app Ive used before. And this is from a game that is almost entirely text-based. The programming is probably not very optimized, and the developers havent bothered fixing it we guess.
The game is good but it's not optimized for mobile at all. We're rather enjoy the spartan aesthetic, but the UX needs updated for mobile. 1. Buttons need to be bigger. The look is fine but make them at least the size of a finger 2. Make it so we can scroll the event log and also make it larger. Due to the iPhone notch, we could only read one line at a time and missed a lot of the story 3. Maybe allow us to hold down a button to have it auto click at a rate that a human could realistically click a mouse. The gameplay itself is fantastic though. We made the whole universe into clip.
(Some spoilers ahead) As far as bugs go our main issue is with how some things just lose you a bunch of progress, like returning to a world. Every time Ive tried returning to a previous world to reach an artifact easier we end up losing the world we just reached including the artifact even though we already got to it. Another one is with the final Drone/Factory upgrades just not working properly, making phase 2 drag out for a while at the end. We really REALLY hope these bugs get fixed sometime because theyve caused a lot of inconveniences.
Great iOS edition. Wish it had iCloud saves and a better iPad version but its super fun to play. Thanks for the port.
Played the web version a few times and decided to pull the trigger on this once we saw the recent positive reviews. It works great on our phone, but Id love to see a couple of improvements. 1) Cloud save or sync to other iOS devices. Would love to carry progress to our iPad. Which brings us to 2) Allow the iPad to show more on the screen than what you normally get on the phone. Everything is just bigger and you still have to scroll back and forth. Such a waste of real estate. The font is absolutely huge on a 12.9 iPad. Love the artifact additions. Definitely adds to the experience.
Game seems to be bugged when you try to get to space age. Dont have enough clips or dont have enough energy when you disable everything but the solar panels. When you disable everything you have 6 oct. But when you build power to have 10 million mw/s it drops to 3.23 oct.
This game we played in 2004. Not sure why it says 2017, unless someone deleted the traces of it. We play this game every 10 years, we are surprised that its history has been erased of the PC days, that was the only way to play this.
A good update would be the best.
We started to play on the web a few days ago. It's an interesting take on the AI point of view. We do like the first part a little more. The drone power and batteries are too confusing. Our biggest problem with the game is the buttons. Why do we have click so much to interact with the price ? You guys can do something about this. We downloaded the game on our phone thinking it wouldn't be an issue here. But no it's the same thing you have to click click and click. Please take a look at the interface one more time.
Two features that seem like the bare minimum for an idle game are just completely missing. A developer response indicated work on an offline mode to be released in the next few weeks as of.. A year ago. Its a very fun and engaging game on browser, and this is just the browser version kinda fit to a phone screen. If you really want it mobile, this is it, but there are better mobile idle games.
This game is quite engaging, and the addition of artifacts has significantly increased the replayability . That said, there appears to be a significant bug after the first play through in that some upgrades that are supposed to give exponential growth are instead only giving linear growth. For instance with the final factory upgrade in the second phase, we have 200 factories making 2.75 septillion clips a second. Using 5 octillion inches of wire is going to take 1500 seconds. This is a long time to spend in the very end of phase 2 and kinda ruins the pacing.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 2.1
- Size: 186.00 MB
- iOS: 10.0 or later
- Languages: EN
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: Everybody House Games, LLC
Last updated: 12th November 2021 | Genre: Strategy, Simulation | Developer: Everybody House Games, LLC