Doodle God

Doodle God built its entire concept on a simple, almost alchemical idea - combine basic elements and gradually derive ever more complex things from them, until you work your way from fire, water, air and earth all the way to humanity and civilization. Studio JoyBits came up with a game in 2010 that requires no reflexes or strategic planning, just curiosity and a willingness to try non-obvious combinations, such as life arising from sun and mud, or the invention of a gun from metal and gunpowder.

The game's charm lay in the gradual revealing of a tree of knowledge, where the player never quite knew what a given combination would produce, and discovering new categories - plants, animals, people, technologies - worked as a small reward for experimenting. This trial-and-error loop proved surprisingly addictive, and Doodle God helped kick off an entire wave of similarly built combination games on the web and later on mobile. The graphic style stayed spare, almost iconic, which made the game accessible even on the slower computers of the time and also let it run in practically any browser without demanding much performance.

Doodle God also became one of the direct inspirations for the later and much better-known Little Alchemy, which simplified and polished the same principle for a wider audience, though the original Doodle God, with its thematic range from mythology to science, stayed a bit closer to a more mature take on alchemy. Today the original game only runs through Flash emulators, even though the series went on to continue in mobile and paid versions as well.

Why play it: For players who enjoy calm combinatorial puzzles with no time pressure and want to see where today's genre of merge games came from.