Ethos Idle vs Hammurabi
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both games, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Ethos Idle
Guide humanity's progress from its earliest discoveries to the distant future. Manage your tribe's choices, develop over 200 unique ideas, and explore the world. Advance your civilization, unlock bonuses, and enjoy a single-player, offline experience with optional ads.
- Develop over 200 historic ideas
- Explore and exploit the world
- Manage tribe choices
- Unlock exploration bonuses and synergies
- Prestige mechanic upgrades
- Customizable challenge scenarios
- Offline single-player experience
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Chart the progess of Humanity through the ages, and guide their every discovery from the moment they kindle the first fire to the far future. Develop over 200 unique ideas across three different flavours of thought. Help your people to conquer or make peace with their enemies, explore and exploit the world, and develop projects to meet their needs. Manage your tribe's choices to squeeze out more strength, or sit back and idle as your clan develop on their own. Advance as far as you can take your people, and then collect bonuses to improve future runs. Select varied challenges that change the way the game plays, and combine these challenges to create your own unique scenarios with big rewards. Features: - Over 200 historic ideas to develop, across 3 flavours of thought - Dozens of exploration bonuses and synergies to unlock and exploit - Permanently power up your civilisation with prestige mechanic upgrades - Combine varied challenge conditions to create your own scenarios with powerful rewards - Optional, out-of-the-way ads won't interrupt your experience - A completely offline, single player experience - All game content is accessible for free
Hammurabi
Manage an ancient kingdom's land, grain, and people over a ten-year reign. Make critical decisions about buying/selling land, feeding citizens, and planting harvests. Face unpredictable events like rats and plague, and rule wisely to be remembered or face impeachment.
- Manage land, grain, and people
- Buy or sell farmland
- Feed citizens from granary
- Plant next year's harvest
- Authentic CRT terminal look
- Local high scores
- In-app history lesson
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Before there were graphics. Before there was color. There was a blinking cursor, a glowing screen, and one simple question: how many acres will you plant this year? Hamurabi puts you at the helm of ancient Sumeria for a ten-year reign, rendered exactly the way computing felt back in the early days — green (or amber) phosphor text scrolling up a CRT screen, sitting right there on a desk, waiting for your command. Each year, you'll manage your kingdom's land, grain, and people: • Buy or sell acres of farmland • Feed your citizens from the granary • Plant next year's harvest Nothing is guaranteed. Rats can raid your stores. Plague can sweep through your population. A bad harvest can leave you scrambling. Rule wisely for ten years and history remembers you well. Rule poorly, and you'll be impeached on the spot. THE HISTORY BEHIND THE GAME Hamurabi is a tribute to one of the oldest computer games still played today. It began in the late 1960s as "The Sumer Game," built for an early mainframe, and was soon reshaped by Doug Dyment into a short, sharp game called Hamurabi. In 1973, David H. Ahl translated it into BASIC and printed it in his book 101 BASIC Computer Games — one of the best-selling computing books of the decade. Because the full source code sat right there on the page, an entire generation typed it in by hand on their own home computers, making Hamurabi one of the very first resource-management games millions of people ever played. Its fingerprints are all over SimCity, Civilization, and every "build and manage" game that followed. WHAT'S IN THE APP • An authentic CRT terminal look — scanlines, phosphor glow, and a real boot-up sequence • Choose green or amber, just like the old monitors • Local high scores, with your ruler rating from Impeached to Fantastic • A full in-app history lesson — on the game itself, and on the real King Hammurabi the name comes from • Ambient background music while you rule No accounts, no logins, no busywork. Just you, ten years, and a kingdom that lives or dies by your decisions. Can you rule as wisely as the real Hammurabi — or will you go down as a National Fink?
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is in-app purchases: Hammurabi at none against Ethos Idle's 1. Hammurabi also leads on rating (5.0 vs 4.8) and review sentiment (100% vs 84%). Ethos Idle's advantage is ratings volume (242 vs 2) and iOS requirement (15.0 vs 17.6). On price, ads and device support there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Ethos Idle sells 1 one-off in-app purchase. Hammurabi asks for nothing beyond the download.
Hammurabi holds the better App Store score, 5.0 against 4.8. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: Ethos Idle has 242 ratings behind it against 2, so its average is the more settled of the two. Written reviews point the same way: 84% of Ethos Idle's written reviews are positive against 100% of Hammurabi's.
| Parameter | Ethos Idle | Hammurabi |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 4.8 (242 ratings) | 5.0 (2 ratings) — better |
| Positive reviews | 84.4% of reviews | 100.0% of reviews — better |
| Number of ratings | 242 — better | 2 |
| Update frequency | Every 3 weeks | — |
| Ads | Yes | Yes |
| In-app purchases | Yes | No — better |
| Monetization | Free with in-app purchases | Ad-supported — better |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, iPod — better | iPhone, iPad |
| Requires iOS | 15.0 — better | 17.6 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 101 MB | 7 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Graham Goldstein | Ken Boone |
Customer experience
Ethos Idle
Hammurabi
Bugs and requests
Ethos Idle
Reported bugs
2 issues- RNG for challenges is unfair and unfun
- Unlocking buffs for inaccessible technologies
Requested features
2 requests- Option to remove ads entirely
- Clarification on prestige warp gain multipliers
Hammurabi
Not enough reviews yet to summarise bugs or requests.
In-app purchases
Ethos Idle
- x2 Speed$6.99
Hammurabi
No in-app purchases









