The Cool Merge is an incremental game with merge elements that focuses specifically on the evolution of life on Earth. The player's goal is to merge lifeforms until they recreate people from recent history and modern society and then go beyond to create potential lifeforms of the near and distant future. They also earn coins via click-tap interactions with the lifeforms and automatic idle money generation from each new life.
The game refers to all lifeforms as Sapiens, even the non-human ones. The player cracks egg-like seeds to reveal Amoeba Sapiens. They merge identical ones to create Scorpion Sapiens. As they progress through the merges, they create sheep, dinosaurs, sloths and gorillas. Once this initial era ends, the player unlocks a new era, out of six possible eras, that features humans, including cavemen, farmers, knights, princesses and jesters.
The player must switch between eras to reach a point when, with the money they earn, they can stop using the seeds in the first era and instead drop boxes in the current one that feature the most current, highest evolved lifeform for that era. Opening the boxes is equivalent to cracking seeds. The player then simply merges matching humans.
The Cool Merge allows the player to use boosters by watching ads. They can set up boosters to generate more coins, upgrade seeds and speed up events. They can also earn high money rewards by selecting on-screen Sapiens repeatedly during special races in which they must advance a blue horizontal bar past a red one.
