Gold Mining Tycoon

This hub is smaller — four games instead of seven — because the genre itself is narrower: idle and incremental mining, the kind of game that keeps ticking over between visits and rewards you for checking in rather than for staying glued to the screen. All four dig for something (ore, gold, gems, freight), but the loop that gets you there differs more than the theme suggests.

Idle Planet Miner is the purest incremental of the group — planets, managers, numbers that grow while you are away. Mine Rescue turns the digging into an actual puzzle with a rescue objective sitting on top of it, so it asks for more attention than a typical idler. Cat Miners: Mining Gold Tycoon dresses the same idle bones in a cosy, cartoon cast and a gentler pace. Train Idle Miner: Merge Tycoon swaps straightforward upgrades for a merge board, which changes the moment-to-moment decisions even though the destination — a bigger, more automated operation — is the same.

If you have played one idle miner before, expect the broad shape of all four to feel familiar: start small, automate a little, come back later to a bigger number. What we compare in the table on this page is how much of that automation each one hands you early, and how much manual tapping or puzzling it still expects.