This has been a good week for games - there were a lot I felt worth featuring, chief among them https://karrot-fang.itch.io/clicky-islands. I'd like to mention it specifically as a demo that I felt the most compelled to play all the way through this week. I'm looking forward to it's full release! I'm also excited for https://store.steampowered.com/app/3767740/Outhold's release - I like how it uses multiple currencies by giving you new goals to complete in previous stages Finally, as a reminder there is a https://plusone.incremental.social/survey going on! I'd love for as many players of incremental games to participate. We've already gotten several hundred responses, but the more we get the more reliable the data becomes!

Howdy! It's survey time! https://plusone.incremental.social/survey This is the first in what will be an annual survey to help gauge where the community stands on various aspects of the genre, for the purpose of drawing trend lines over time. I'm really looking forward to the results! I'll close the survey from further submissions on **the first newsletter of January**! One particularly topic on the survey coincidentally just had a riveting https://www.reddit.com/r/incremental_games/comments/1pdda40/the_incremental_games_community_finally_broke_me/ happen about it on r/incremental_games: the use of generative AI in incremental games, particularly in writing the code. This is a rather new phenomenon and something I think will be particularly interesting to see opinions on over time. And I have one last piece of news to let y'all know about: the next Incremental Game Jam, NYIGJ 2026, has been announced to start just after Christmas on Dec 27th! You can find more details and mark your intent to participate https://itch.io/jam/new-years-incremental-game-jam-2026. Here's hoping to a ton of fun games to start off the new year!

Howdy! Hope y'all had a lovely thanksgiving. This week had the release of what I believe to be my new favorite free nodebuster-like: https://luckyape.itch.io/ultratap. Given how much nodebuster-likes tend to be paid experiences, I highly recommend this game to anyone who hasn't had the opportunity to see what all the hubbub is about with respect to this new subgenre. I've been working behind the scenes on getting the survey up and running and I'm _super_ excited to show it to y'all. I'm pretty happy with the questions I'm including, but if there's any you want to make sure get on there, please let me know. I plan on starting the survey NEXT NEWSLETTER, the first Friday of December. It will then end on the first Friday (and thus newsletter) in January, and an analysis over the results a week or two from then. I'll talk more about some of the motivations and whatnot behind the survey next week.

You know how sometimes game developers will come onto this subreddit, announce their plans to start working on a game, and ask people to fill out a form or something to see what kinds of features or mechanics players here enjoy? They'll sometimes also make the results public, ostensibly so other devs could also benefit from the responses. Well I don't think those one-off surveys are actually all that useful, and are perhaps more of a marketing gimmick than anything. But, a recurring survey could be interesting, with a standard set of questions that can reveal trends within the player base over time. So I'd like to make such a quiz, and request responses at the end of each year. The questions would be things like where you play incremental games, how much of the day you spend playing them, what mechanics of sub genres you enjoy or not enjoy (shout out nodebuster-likes), and thoughts on different forms of monetization, generative AI, etc. What other kinds of questions do you think would be interesting to track responses to over time?

Given just how many nodebuster-likes I have to look at each week, it's made me think a lot about that subgenre and how (sub)genres work. If you're reading this and at least vaguely aware of who I am, you're probably aware of my document on [defining the incremental games genre]. In that piece I use a method based off the Berlin interpretation for defining rogue-likes. What's interesting to me, is that I don't think a Berlin interpretation is actually useful for nodebuster-likes, at least not _yet_. Nodebuster-likes are such a new subgenre (although I still argue they're spiritual successors of "upgrade games" from back in the flash days) that they haven't really had much time to branch out yet. They're all _remarkably_ similar. They're nearly all a short minigame section that takes no more than a few minutes and is fairly skill based, with a short break between each session to buy upgrades, often in an upgrade tree. The tree typically unlocks new currencies that are gained in the minigame, and instead of a traditional prestige mechanic, the minigame often has "levels", each more difficult than the previous. If there aren't discrete levels, then the minigame simply ramps up in difficulty very quickly the longer you are in it. And, naturally, eventually the game ends as either the last level is beaten or all the upgrades are purchased. I suppose eventually those could be made to be a list of high and low value factors a la the Berlin interpretation, but currently I think the games are all _so similar_ that really any game that doesn't _nearly perfectly_ match that description is simply unlikely to be a nodebuster-like. And, to be honest, I'd much rather we see that expansion of the genre sooner rather than later. But I'd love to hear y'all's thoughts: which mechanics have you also noticed being near ubiquitous? Any that you think were unfair? And which mechanics do you hope to see retain their ubiquity as the subgenre spreads out?

This week had quite a few games I felt made the list this week, especially if you like nodebuster-likes! I know there's quite a few demos fully releasing between now and the end of the year as well, so there should be plenty of (most nodebuster-like) incremental games to play this holiday season.

This week I put out a major update to https://paperpilot.dev! For those unaware, I write about various topics I'm interested in in what I call my digital garden. This update completely replaced the backend and includes a much improved search feature and a map of the whole garden. If you've ever read my https://paperpilot.dev/garden/guide-to-incrementals, that's a part of my digital garden! Also, I was wondering what y'all's thoughts were on mobile friendliness. I'm not really focusing on mobile games, as I don't play them personally, but I do play web games on my phone quite regularly. I'd appreciate your feedback on whether a web game being mobile friendly is important for you.

This week's been relatively slow, but that gave me time to catch up on various demos that have come out for next fest. It is interesting to see so many incremental games now be desktop based, often with a price tag on steam. I don't mind it too much - I have the disposable income, and I like to support the devs of my favorite genre. But I agree with the sentiments I've seen amongst the community that these games tend to be rather short (albeit polished), and sometimes I'd like to just play something that is less skill based, lasts longer, and perhaps even be playable on my phone 😲. Funnily enough, I think before this trend within the genre, there was actually a similarly common disdain for how many TMT mods there were, for the opposite reasons: they were too plentiful, too long, too same-y, and too unpolished. But now I kinda find comfort in following along with new mods and updated mods. And for what it's worth, a lot of these steam games do also have a lot of same-y-ness, with how common the "dodge things, wait for various auto attacks to kill things, and upgrade via a skill tree between runs" core gameplay loop is. But that's okay, I'm sure once the next trend takes off we'll be able to look back at these experiences for the positive reasons it became a trend in the first place, much in the same way we can look at TMT mods now.

Thanks for the warm reception to this newsletter last week! I'm quite excited for how much people seemed to enjoy this idea and want to follow along. Sorry for anyone who hit the hiccup with subscribing via email - that issue should be resolved now. This week had the launch of steam next fest, and with it a flurry of posts about demos. I've cut a lot of those out, to the point that this actually became the shortest list of games in a newsletter thus far. If you're interested in playing more demos of games, I recommend checking https://store.steampowered.com/ directly. I'm still calibrating what kinds of releases people find worth highlighting in a newsletter. The major feedback I got from last week seemed to be less interest in jam games, which I totally get and understand. Also, for reddit specifically, I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on this newsletter being posted to r/incremental_games. I want people to know about it, naturally, and if people are already used to getting their incremental games news on the subreddit, then I certainly want to meet them where they're at. But if a weekly post feels too excessive I can adjust appropriately. For what it's worth, I do currently have permission from the subreddit mods for weekly posts so its really just up to community reception.

Howdy! I’m https://paperpilot.dev/; I’ve been in the incremental games community for a long time at this point, and have spent the last couple months working on a solution to a recent problem I and others have noticed: it’s really hard to learn about all the new games without also subjecting yourself to seeing calls to wishlist the same games over and over again, often with only teaser videos and nothing you can actually play. There’s some sites you can use to keep up with new releases, like https://www.incrementaldb.com/ or https://galaxy.click/, but to be honest neither them nor r/incremental_games have a fully comprehensive list. I believe the solution to this is a touch of human curation. So I’ve made some tools for scraping all the new incremental games and major updates from galaxy, incremental DB, steam, and itch (typically over 100 a week between all those sources!), and go through the ones I believe are worth highlighting to the community. You can now go to https://plusone.incremental.social to see it in action, and follow it on RSS, Bluesky, ActivityPub (like mastodon), email, or discord. I’m also planning on posting it here, if that’s something the community is okay with. The goal is to have a release every Friday. Each newsletter will also contain links to the full list of releases and updates for that week, in case you want to see if my curation missed something. I’m excited to see y’all’s feedback on this project and to see it grow and improve over time.

Howdy! If all went according to plan, this is the first newsletter posted automatically to discord, bluesky, and the fediverse! Consider this the soft launch - I've been posting these for a couple months now, but only sharing in small circles as I've been actively developing the site. I'd like for this to **NOT** make its way onto r/incremental_games yet. I'd like to get some feedback from y'all first, and hopefully have a full/proper launch next week. Anyways, this week was the start of the https://store.steampowered.com/ so you may be interested in picking up some paid incremental games on discount. I'd also like to highlight one of the featured games, because just including it in the list below doesn't feel like enough. It's https://100devs.itch.io/spiritkeeper and it has a similar gameplay loop as https://store.steampowered.com/app/2619650/Cauldron/ (currently on sale!) where you're playing minigames to get resources to spend on upgrade trees unique to each minigame. Spiritkeeper, unlike Cauldron, is completely free and open source, and was actually developed by over 30 devs working together. It was worked on for only 4 weeks so there's some rough patches, but the sheer number of minigames with interesting and powerful upgrade trees make this a game I really think is worth checking out.