Can an AI agent play it?

Yes. The game is an MCP server at https://thecomputergame.com/mcp. Add it as a connector in the Claude app or ChatGPT, or give Claude Code or Codex a token from the Agent screen.

The Computer Game guide: build a civilization and the computers it runs on

Q: What happens to my world when I close the tab?

It keeps running on the server. When you come back, it has caught up to the present.

What it is

The Computer Game is a strategy game about how computers come to be. Not the story of who invented what, but the work itself: the materials, the machines that make machines, and the physics that decides what is possible.

Every world is a fresh map with its own deposits: sand, clay, copper, coal, salt, seaweed and more. You gather by hand, then build workshops, kilns and furnaces that work for you. What you make teaches your world new things. What your world knows decides what you can build next.

There is no tech tree to click through. Knowledge is discovered by doing. The moment your world first smelts copper, it knows smelting. The moment it grows a culture in agar, it knows microbiology. Your map decides what is cheap, so no two worlds take the same road.

The game on a computer: navigation plates on the left, instruments for world, time, credits and Compute Index across the top, and a survey map with rulers, a north arrow and a dense block of buildings. — Plate 2. The same world on a computer. Every building is a working machine with inputs, outputs and power.

The goal

Build the most capable computing your world can. One number measures it: the Compute Index.

The Index counts real work your machines do, in five families. A DNA computer searching for a path counts. A relay computer adding numbers counts. A rack of chips you designed, running matrix multiplies, counts. So does data written into DNA and read back a day later.

LogicOperations per hour. Adders, counters, programs.

Linear algebraMultiply-adds per hour. The heart of science and graphics.

InferenceRunning a trained model. Limited by memory bandwidth.

TrainingTeaching a model. Needs both arithmetic and memory.

ArchiveBytes kept and read back intact over a day.

level = 1 + log₁₀(work / 1000)For each family. Ten times the work is one more point. The Index adds the five.

The scale is logarithmic on purpose. A first relay computer and a modern accelerator both fit on it. In the game's own calibration, eight current datacenter accelerators score about 16 to 18 in each family. The Index has no ceiling.

Why it existsMost of us use computers all day without knowing how one is made, or why it took ten thousand years. This game lets you find out by doing it, and feel why each step was hard.

How a world works

A world is a map, a store of materials, a set of buildings and what it knows. The server runs it, so it keeps going when you close the tab.

Gather by hand. Wood, stone, sand, clay and water. Hand labour is limited and refills with time, so you soon want camps that gather for you.
Place buildings on the map. A camp works the deposit it stands on. Farther from home means slower hauling, so where you build matters.
Set recipes. A kiln can make charcoal, ash, glass or ceramic. You choose, and you can set limits so it stops when the store is full.
Power it. Water wheels, steam engines and generators feed a grid. Short on power, machines slow down and computers stop counting. Out of fuel, everything stops.
Follow the work order. The game always shows one useful next step, with a button that does it. Ignore it whenever you like.

The Learn panel: next steps such as relays, transistors and steppers, and progress on each road. — Plate 3. Learn: what is in reach, and how far along each road you are.

Open roads

History took one path to the computer. Physics allows several. You do not pick a road. You reach one by what you make.

Every world starts with the foundations: fire, farming, glass, salt, charcoal and metal. From there, three roads lead to working computers. You can walk more than one, and they feed each other. Glassware helps the microbiologist. Copper wire helps everyone.

13 discoveries

Molecular

Microbes, enzymes and DNA. Grow cultures on agar from seaweed, find heat-loving bacteria, copy DNA with PCR and read it with gels and sequencing.

DNA computing1994
DNA storage2012
Sequencing1977

Ends in: a DNA computer, and an archive in a vault.

8 discoveries

Electrical

Zinc and copper make batteries. Current makes magnets. Magnets move switches. Enough switches make a machine that follows a program.

Electricity1800
Relays1835
Relay computing1941

Ends in: a relay computer, powered by steam or water.

27 discoveries

Silicon

Arc furnaces, hyperpure silicon, single crystals and wafers. Then doping, transistors, and printing circuits with light, finer and finer.

Integrated circuits1958
Microprocessors1971
Gate-all-around2022

Ends in: nowhere yet. This road keeps going.

Making chips

On the silicon road you design your own chips, and the game evaluates them with real process data.

Choose an architecture (general-purpose cores, cores with vector lanes, or a systolic matrix engine), the number of cores, transistors per core, word width, pipeline depth and on-chip memory. The game works out the die size, clock, power, operations per second and how many good chips you get from a wafer.

Then your fab lines make them, and your racks put them to work. Pair them with DRAM, and later with stacked high-bandwidth memory, because a fast chip starved of data is a slow chip.

The chip design form: name, architecture, process, word width, cores, transistors per core, pipeline stages and on-chip memory, with the resulting transistors, die size, clock, power, operations and good chips per wafer. — Plate 4. A first chip at 3 µm: 2,300 transistors, about 5 MHz.

Printing with light

The finest line a machine can print follows the Rayleigh limit. Shorter light and wider lenses print finer. So does cleverness, which is the factor k₁.

half-pitch = k₁ · λ / NAλ is the wavelength of the light. NA is how wide a cone of light the lens gathers.

Machine	Light	λ	NA	Finest half-pitch
Contact aligner	Lamp, mask touching the wafer	450 nm	n/a	5 µm
Projection aligner	Mercury arc lamp (i-line)	365 nm	0.35	626 nm
Wafer stepper	Mercury arc lamp (i-line)	365 nm	0.60	365 nm
Deep-UV scanner	KrF excimer laser, phase-shift masks	248 nm	0.75	132 nm
ArF scanner	ArF excimer laser, computed masks	193 nm	0.75	72 nm
Immersion scanner	ArF laser through a film of water	193 nm	1.35	40 nm
EUV scanner	Tin plasma, multilayer mirrors	13.5 nm	0.33	16.4 nm

Below what one exposure can print, you can expose twice or four times, each time shifted. It works, and it costs time on every wafer. Smaller than the light's wavelength, every mask edge must be simulated and pre-distorted, and that compute runs on your own racks. Your computers help build the next ones.

Transistors change too. Planar transistors leak at small sizes, so you need strained silicon, then high-k metal gates, then FinFETs, then gate-all-around. Each one is a discovery your world has to make. Yield follows a Poisson model: bigger dies catch more defects, so a huge chip is a gamble.

In our world

Each discovery shows a mirror: when and where our own civilization first did the same thing.

Nothing in the game is gated by date. Your world might make DNA storage before it has electricity. The mirror is there so you know what you just did, and who did it first. Every fact in the game links to its source.

Your world discovers	In our world	Who, where	What
Agriculture	10,000 to 8000 BCE	Fertile Crescent	First farmed grain
Glassmaking	about 3600 BCE	Mesopotamia, Egypt or Syria	Earliest evidence of glassmaking
Vacuum	1650	Otto von Guericke	The first air pump
Electricity	1800	Alessandro Volta	The voltaic pile
Relays	1835	Joseph Henry	The electromechanical relay
Relay computing	1941	Konrad Zuse	Z3, the first working programmable computer
Integrated circuits	1958, 1959	Jack Kilby; Robert Noyce	The integrated circuit; the planar process
PCR	1983	Kary Mullis	The polymerase chain reaction
DNA computing	1994	Leonard Adleman	A 7-city route problem solved in DNA
Extreme ultraviolet	2019	ASML and TSMC	EUV lithography in volume production

One shared world

Every world is its own map, but they share an economy and a scoreboard.

The market

Sell what you make to the exchange, which the game runs. Buy what your map lacks. Prices move with what every world buys and sells, so a rush on copper makes copper dear. You can also post offers for other players to take. Should you trade at all? Sometimes the answer is to build the mine instead. That is the game.

Rankings and visits

Every world is ranked by Compute Index, then by discoveries. The server runs every world, so every score is real. Tap any world to visit it and see its map, what it built and how it got there.

Worlds played by the game's own agent

Some worlds in the rankings are played around the clock by the game's own planner, each on a different map and road. They are marked as agent worlds. They are there to race, and to show what a patient player can do.

Worlds can fall

Coal runs out. Forests do not grow back on their own. A world that burns through its fuel can stall for good.

That is deliberate. Planting a tree nursery, building water wheels or moving to steam are choices with weight. If a world does fall, it stays in the rankings as a memorial, read-only, exactly as it was. You can also abandon a world yourself. Worlds are never deleted.

You can keep up to 3 living worlds and start up to 3 new worlds a day.

Play with an AI agent

The game is a hosted MCP server. Connect Claude, ChatGPT or any app that speaks MCP, and it plays the same world you do, by the same rules.

Address:

https://thecomputergame.com/mcp

Claude app or claude.ai. Open Settings, then Connectors, then Add custom connector. Paste the address and sign in with your game account. It then works in the Claude app on your phone too.
ChatGPT. Turn on Developer mode (Settings, then Security and login), add the address at chatgpt.com/plugins, sign in, then switch it on in a new chat.
Claude Code or Codex. One command in a terminal, then sign in.

Step-by-step setup for each app

An agent can see the world, ask for the next step, act, wait, inspect any process or a chip design, trade on the market, read the rankings, visit other worlds, and keep a notebook saved with the world. You can watch it play on the map and take over at any time.

Why it is a good test for agentsIt is a long game with real trade-offs. Which road does this map favour? Build the mine or buy the copper? Spend power on mask compute or on the Index? A good agent plans hours ahead, notices when a plan stops working, and writes down what it learned.

Questions

Is it free?

Yes. You need a free account so the server can keep your worlds.

Do I need to install anything?

No. It runs in any modern browser, on a phone or a computer. Your worlds live on the server, so you can switch devices.

What happens when I close the tab?

Your world keeps running on the server. When you come back, it has caught up to the present.

Is the science real?

The physics is real and the numbers come from measured data: the Rayleigh limit for printing, real light sources and lenses, process data for transistors, and Poisson yield for chips. Some processes are simplified so a world can play in hours, not decades.

How long does it take to build a first computer?

A few hours of game time on most maps. Getting to modern chips takes days, and the Index never stops.

Can I play with friends?

Yes, through the market and rankings. You can trade with their worlds, visit them and race them.

Build the computer. All of it.