Ponzi Potato vs. Universal Paperclips
If you have played Universal Paperclips, parts of Ponzi Potato will feel familiar. That’s on purpose. Here is what we borrowed, what we changed, and why.
Two games about doing one thing too well
Universal Paperclips, made by Frank Lantz in 2017, casts you as an AI told to make paperclips. It does exactly that, and keeps doing it, until there is nothing left in the universe that isn’t a paperclip. It’s a small browser game made mostly of numbers and buttons, and one of the best arguments ever made for the idle genre: a joke about runaway optimisation that turns into a story.
Ponzi Potato tells a similar joke about a different kind of machine. You plant one potato. Then you build a farm, a snack empire, an investment fund that pays old investors with new investors’ money, and a pyramid of friends who farm for you. At the end, there is nothing left in the universe that isn’t a potato. Except you.
What we borrowed
- Business as a few honest numbers. Price, public demand and a marketing level that doubles in cost. Paperclips showed that a price button and a demand percentage are enough to make players think like a shopkeeper; our Business panel is a direct homage.
- Projects that change the rules. A short list of one-off upgrades, each a little joke that permanently changes how the game works. We show four at a time, cheapest first, so the list stays a menu rather than a shopping catalogue.
- No explanations. Paperclips trusts you to work things out from the numbers. We try to do the same: Manufacturing shows what your machines make, what people buy and the price, and lets you draw the conclusion.
- A timing game in the middle of an idle game. Paperclips’ quantum computer has chips that flicker in and out, and you get the most out of it by clicking when they all light up. Our photo op is the same idea: six press cameras flash in and out, and you smile when they all flash at once.
- Late-game science. Like Paperclips, we end with a computer that thinks up things you can’t buy with money: our quantum computer runs on energy from a reactor and produces insight for research projects.
Where we go our own way
| Universal Paperclips | Ponzi Potato | |
|---|---|---|
| The joke | An AI that takes its goal too literally | A get-rich-quick scheme that takes itself too seriously |
| What you see | Text and numbers | Numbers, and a field that grows from a garden bed to a galaxy |
| Other people | Single player | A real pyramid: friends you invite make your farm bigger, and a public leaderboard |
| When you’re away | Keeps running in the tab | The farm rests until you’re back (a farmhand keeps it going) |
| Length | Several hours | About an hour and a half |
| Money | Free in the browser | Free to play, with a black market whose advantages are labelled as bribes on the leaderboard |
Why pictures
Paperclips gets away with pure numbers because its numbers tell a story: wire, clips, drones, probes. A potato is less dramatic. So every land in Ponzi Potato has its own picture, and every planting and harvest shows up in it: dots in a garden bed, beds on a farm, districts sown by crop-duster planes, a map of North America, planets around a potato sun. Watching your field fill up is half the fun of an idle game, so we let you watch.
Why a real pyramid
A game about pyramid schemes felt dishonest without one. Invite someone and, once they make it to the Family Farm, your land holds more and more people buy from you. It’s a pyramid, just a fair one: the bonuses are in the game only, they’re capped, nobody pays anybody, and only two levels count. The leaderboard and the crown you can buy for one dollar more than the last person are there for the same reason: if you satirise status games, you might as well let people play one.
Play both
If you haven’t played Universal Paperclips, do: it’s free, it runs in a browser, and it’s a small masterpiece. Then come back and plant a potato. It ends the same way, more or less: with everything turned into one thing. Ours just has more fries.