Many Ninjas

Most ninja games start with a ninja. Many Ninjas starts with rice. Harvest the rice, cook it, and the ninjas come to you, drawn by a full kitchen the way any sensible mercenary is. Jason Estey, posting as parappayo, built it for Ludum Dare 30 in August 2014, one year after Cookie Clicker redrew the browser-idle map, and it still plays like a jam entry that outgrew the jam.

What the loop feels like

You work the fields, the rice goes to the cook pot, and a new silhouette slips through the gate to join the horde. That's Many Ninjas.

Then the horde marches. Castles get raided, the raids come home loaded with more rice, and the rice buys the upgrades that make the next raid faster and bloodier. A self-playing ninja army, fed on agriculture. That's Many Ninjas.

Rice, raids and the horde

The economy has two ends and both of them are rice. The quiet end is the farm: harvest, cook, attract, with the kitchen acting as a recruitment building whose output scales with your grain. The loud end is the raid: point the growing army at a castle, collect the loot, and reinvest it in the upgrades that turn a scattering of recruits into a proper legion.

It is an idle in the oldest sense: the horde keeps performing once it is big enough, and your job drifts from doing to directing. There is no prestige layer and no meta-currency, just a rising count of ninjas and a rising count of castles, which for a Ludum Dare 30 build is the correct amount of ambition.

Where it stumbles

Scope first: it is a game jam build, and no amount of affection turns a jam build into a long-haul idle. Then preservation, which is the bigger problem. The game was Flash, the original home at bushidoburrito.com now returns a 404, and the only live location is an embed of the old SWF that leans on Ruffle-style emulation in modern browsers. The developer moved on and the update path ended roughly a decade ago. What exists today is a preserved artifact, not a maintained product.

Playing it today

Almost Idle hosts the current live embed, which the developer's own site points to. The original 2015 build also survives in the Wayback Machine if you want to see it in its first home. Give the emulation a moment to load the old Flash file.

The verdict

A short, charming oddity from the browser-idle boom's jam wing: rice in, ninjas out, castles down. It will not hold you for a month, but it costs nothing, loads in a browser, and its loop is cleaner than a lot of far longer games. Feed the kitchen once and see if the horde catches you.