CivClicker
Click wood, found a thorp, raise an empire: the 2011 ancestor of civilization incrementals, kept alive by its community.
by David Holley; continuation by deathraygames · 2011 · Web
CivClicker is David Holley's 2011 civilization incremental, and a startling amount of the genre descends from it: click wood, gather food, found a thorp, grow it into a city, and manage a little civilisation's whole resource web one click at a time.
What the loop feels like
You click wood, the wood founds a thorp, and the thorp's citizens gather wood for you. The first automation is always the same revelation, and this is one of the games that taught it. That's CivClicker.
Buildings unlock jobs, jobs unlock resources, and your settlement climbs the civilization ladder from thorp to empire. Your founding settlement is named The Thorp of Woodstock, which tells you everything about the game's tone: earnest systems, gently silly dressing. That's CivClicker.
The systems doing the work
The named systems are active clicking, idle progression, automation and a full resource economy: population as the automation layer, buildings as the unlock structure, and a dozen interlocking resources from wood and food up through the empire-tier materials. It is a wider web than most browser games of 2011 attempted, and its descendants, from settlement idlers to full civilization clickers, still follow the outline it drew.
Where it stumbles
Age is the honest caveat. The interface is 2011 all the way down, the balance curve is shallow by modern standards, and the original site died with its domain, which is now a D&D encounter calculator, a fact the Buttons! entry mentions with the same mild grief. What plays today is a community continuation, not the developer's own channel.
Playing it today
Free and playable at the community continuation, verified live at version 1.4.0, open source, with speedruns of all things. The original open-source release even has a SourceForge mirror from 2014. If the same-dev story interests you, Buttons! is the smaller lost sibling on the same domain.
The verdict
A foundational text of the genre: play it to see where the civilization-idle conventions came from, and play the continuation because the community kept the fire lit. The fact that a world-record speedrun exists for a 2011 clicker tells you everything about its depth.
Gameplay videos
If you like CivClicker
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