What you are actually doing
You land somewhere hostile, and the local wildlife turns out to be a small breeding creature called a Trimp. You build traps and catch them. Every Trimp you hold is both a worker and a soldier: assign one to a job and it farms, chops wood, mines metal or researches science, leave it unemployed and it joins the queue to be sent out and killed. Each soldier is therefore a worker you are not employing, and the breeding timer is the clock every other number is measured against.
Combat is automatic, and it is not the damage-per-second treadmill the genre usually hands you. Your army walks a zone one cell at a time, each cell holds one enemy, and you either out-damage it or you stop. There is no waiting your way through a wall. You leave the world, run a map, come back stronger. Trimps is mostly the experience of hitting a wall and working out which of about eight systems is lagging, which is either the best thing about it or the reason you bounce off in the first hour.
The four resets, and why they all sound alike
The reason nobody explains Trimps well is that it uses the word "prestige" for the layer that is not the prestige. In order of size:
Equipment prestiges. Inside a single run, maps drop upgrades that reset a piece of gear to level 1 and make every subsequent level far stronger. Cheap, constant, in-run only, gone when you reset. The in-game advisor is right about these: prestige a piece before you pour resources into levels, never after.
The Portal. The real run reset, opened around zone 20 by a unique map called the Dimension of Anger. The strongest enemy in each zone drops Helium. Portalling drops you back at zone 1 and lets you spend accumulated Helium on Perks, permanent multipliers you re-buy from scratch every time. This is the loop you will live in: push until zones stop dying, portal, arrive further next time.
Challenges. A portal with a rule attached. Some pay out a new Perk the first time you clear them, which is why the game nudges you toward Discipline or Metal on your first reset. Later, Challenge² re-runs challenges you have already beaten and pays a permanent bonus scaled to how deep you got, so it is a reset layer sitting inside a reset layer.
Universe 2. Far in, the Portal gains a second destination: a parallel game with its own currency (Radon instead of Helium), its own perks, its own jobs and different rules about how damage resolves. Universe 1 stays where you left it. You now have two games sharing one save.
Hold those four apart in your head and the rest reads cleanly. The community wiki assumes you already have.
How a run goes
Zones drop Upgrade Books, and the one at the end of every zone is Coordination, which increases how many Trimps fight as a single unit and raises what you must breed to keep that army standing. Meanwhile the town grows: traps, storage, the housing chain from huts upward, gyms for block, and a job list that widens as you go, with Geneticists, Amalgamators and Magmamancers arriving long after the four you start with.
Maps are the other half. From zone 6 you can leave the world and run a generated map, paying Fragments to bias its size, difficulty and loot. Maps are where equipment prestiges come from, and clearing one at your current zone level grants a damage buff that stacks ten times, which is the standard answer to a zone you cannot beat. Void Maps are rarer and harder and drop Heirlooms; surplus ones recycle into Nullifium to improve the Heirlooms you kept. Later, deep clears start Liquifying early zones, so your first several dozen zones evaporate instantly on a new run and the tedium you are bracing for never arrives.
Controls, and the phone question
Everything is a click. Hotkeys are worth turning on: F to fight, R to toggle map repeating, V for the advisor window. Most numbers on screen are clickable and open a breakdown of where that number came from, which is the most useful habit to build early.
On a phone, no. The page ships no viewport meta tag and its layout is sized in viewport-width units with no breakpoint below 1000 pixels, so a phone renders the desktop interface shrunk to illegibility. A tablet in landscape survives. Use a desktop, or the free Steam build, which is the same game in a window.
How long it takes
There is no ending. The first portal takes a few hours, Universe 2 is months of casual play away, and people who have logged years still meet rows of the game they had not seen. It idles well: offline progress is calculated on return, with a setting to tune how it is applied.
Getting further
Take every Coordination the moment you can afford the breeding cost. It is the largest single lever in a run and players routinely sit on it too long.
Turn on the map automation settings early. "Repeat for Items", and "Repeat to 10" with "Exit to World", remove most of the manual clicking.
Portal earlier than feels comfortable, and take a challenge when you do. New players grind a stalled run for hours chasing a few percent more Helium when a reset would have doubled their reach. If a single zone is taking more than a few minutes, you are past the point.
Who made it, and where to play
Trimps is by Greensatellite, who also posts as Brownprobe and who has been updating it since it appeared on Kongregate in 2015. A decade of near-continuous development is unusual here and is most of why the game goes as deep as it does.
Play it free at trimps.github.io. The source is on GitHub at Trimps/Trimps.github.io under the GNU GPL, unminified, so what the browser downloads is the source.
The copy in the frame above is one we serve ourselves from that source. It is not the official version and we are not the publisher. The GPL is a strong copyleft licence, so the source of this exact build, with our changes in it, is downloadable from us at /play/trimps/source.zip, and the licence page lists the changes and reproduces the notice. The one thing worth knowing before you start a run here: the online save backup is switched off on our copy, deliberately, so your save lives in this browser and nowhere else. Export it from the Import menu, or play on trimps.github.io if you want the developer's backup.
A free Steam release arrived in May 2022, and the Kongregate original is still up. If this is more game than you want, Kittens Game asks similar attention with far less combat.