Cookie Clicker might be the Internet’s most addictive game ever

It makes absolutely zero sense, and there’s no end in sight, but we just can’t stop clicking.

With only 14 grandmas, 8 farms, 19 cursors and a trio of factories under our control, we’re not exactly owning Cookie Clicker, the most ridiculously addictive free game available for your desktop, but just you wait until we pull an all-nighter to smack the heck out of our mouse, build a few time machines, dig an empire of cookie mines and become a baked goods overlord.

The premise is superbly simple to understand: begin by clicking on the cookie to the left of your screen to fill your bank with delicious baked currency, before investing them in different add-ons that’ll boost your production to utterly insane levels. That’s it. Yep, that’s actually it. There’s no point, no reason, and no big prize at the end. Just let your epic industry roll on in the background as you sit down to your 9-5 job, and check in every now and again to pimp out your grannies with more skills and boost your cookies-per-second count. Before long, you’ll be building a prism that actually turns light into your tasty little chocolate chip discs, and managing imports from a faraway planet. It’s all just so utterly, utterly pointless, but we love it.

The game, made by French designer Julein Thiennot back in 2013, may only have just entered our lives, but now we’ve had a taste, there’s no going back. Click here to give it a shot yourself, but be warned: this might be the beginning of the end for your social life.

(In the time it’s taken to write this post, we’ve gone from 27 cookies-per-sec to 360, fyi).