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Your Move: What Would You Do With 60 Trillion Cookies?

Dustin Deckard

I've bought a few new games recently: Pokémon Y, Kingdom Hearts 1.5, New Super Luigi U and Infinity Blade III. But, honestly, I haven't had a lot of time to play any of them. I've been immersed at work in front of a computer screen.

At that computer screen, though, there is one game that I've sunk an almost embarrassing amount of time into. The game is called Cookie Clicker.

Cookie Clicker is played in your computer's web browser. When you first go to the game's webpage, you are presented with a large chocolate chunk cookie and a counter that says "0 cookies." Should you click on the cookie, as the name of the game suggests, a cookie will fall from the top of the screen and the counter will say that you have one cookie. Click again for two, three, and so on.

Once you have 15 cookies, a button will light up. Clicking it will spend those 15 cookies, but will gain you a Cursor, which clicks the cookie for you every 10 seconds. The next Cursor costs 17 cookies, the one after that 20 cookies. Each Cursor costs progressively more. When you have 10, you're making one cookie per second.

With 100 cookies, a new button lights up and you can hire a Grandma to bake cookies for you. She'll bake one cookie every two seconds. At 500 cookies, you can buy a cookie farm and make another four cookies per second, at which point you're probably making thousands of cookies.

That's not the end of the game, though. There are upgrades and achievements you can unlock, and a total of 10 different cookie producers you can buy, including a portal to the Cookieverse, which pulls in more than 6,000 cookies per second. I had the game open for a week straight in my web browser, and by the end I was making 50 billion cookies per second. It takes Nabisco about seven-and-a-half years to make that many Oreos, so I think I'm doing pretty good for myself.

The game is decidedly silly and a huge time waster, and doesn't really even have an end goal. But it doesn't really have to. It's totally free, and it's fun to check my cookies after lunch and spend 60 trillion cookies on that 200th Grandma, just to make my cookies-per-second number increment a tiny bit more.

Samuel McConnell is a games enthusiast who has been playing games in one form or another since 1991. He was born in northern Maine but quickly transplanted to Wichita.