AI Dungeon vs Infinite Worlds (2026): Free Story Game or Pay-Per-Turn Story Game?

AI Dungeon and Infinite Worlds both let you type what you do and get a story back. The big difference is how you pay: AI Dungeon’s free tier has no turn limit, while Infinite Worlds gives you a few free turns a day and then charges credits, in return for a wider choice of strong models and more tools to correct the story.

We have played and scored AI Dungeon. Its score on our seven-axis methodology is 2.6 out of 5. We have not played Infinite Worlds, so it has no score, and nothing below is a verdict on how well it writes. What we say about Infinite Worlds comes from its own pages and its community wiki, read on 23 October 2026, and our full Infinite Worlds guide has the detail. What we say about AI Dungeon comes from our review and our directory entry, with prices checked in August 2026.

The Short Version

	AI Dungeon	Infinite Worlds
Our score	2.6 out of 5	Not scored (not played)
Made by	Latitude	Friendly Fox Games, one developer
What it is	An open story with no built-in rules	An AI story game with community worlds and illustrations
Free play	No turn limit on free models	A few free turns a day, 3 at most
Paid	Plans from $14.99 to $99.99 a month	Credits you buy; no subscription, per the wiki
Models	8 on the free tier, 18 on the top plan	14 listed by its wiki, including Claude, GPT and Gemini
Memory tools	Story Cards, Plot Essentials, Author’s Note	Storyteller Mode, a hidden `secretInfo` field, tracked items
Where it plays	Browser, iPhone, Android, Steam	Browser; we found no app
Age	App stores rate it 12+ and Teen	Its terms say you must be 18 or older

If you only read one line: AI Dungeon if you want to play a lot for nothing, Infinite Worlds if you want to choose a strong model and are happy to count credits.

What Each One Is

AI Dungeon, made by Latitude, started the genre in 2019. You type an action and the AI writes what happens, in any genre. It has no dice, no character sheet and no rules unless the author of a scenario scripts them. It has a large library of adventures made by players. Our AI Dungeon review tells the whole story.

Infinite Worlds is made by one developer, Friendly Fox Games, who says he has been building it since November 2023. Its own tagline is “The AI game with unlimited freedom”, and it adds that you might fail. You play worlds that other people made, or describe your own and let a generator build it. Pictures come with the story. It is a browser game, and it has no subscription.

So the two do the same job from different starting points. AI Dungeon is one of the biggest names in the field and has a free door. Infinite Worlds is smaller, newer to most readers, and puts the model choice and the editing tools up front.

Memory: Two Windows, Two Sets of Tools

Both games have the same problem, because both are built on a language model that can only see a limited amount of text at once. Our guide to why AI campaigns forget explains why. What differs is what each one sends and what it gives you to fix mistakes.

AI Dungeon sends a context window. Its size depends on the model, not only on the plan. On our entry, the free tier is up to 4,000 tokens, and the top plans reach 32,000 on most models. Some models are capped lower, and the window is a headline, not a promise. For steering, you get Story Cards, Plot Essentials and an Author’s Note. We scored it Memory & Continuity — 3. Our Story Cards guide shows how to use them.

Infinite Worlds sends, according to its wiki, your world’s main instructions, your action, the last 2 to 8 turns word for word, and a summary of everything before that. A separate AI rewrites the summary from turn 8 and every 6 turns after. The wiki is honest that the summary loses information, and that once something is gone the storyteller has no way to know.

What it gives you for the repair is the more hands-on of the two:

Storyteller Mode. It shows the hidden fields, lets you edit the current turn and lets you tell the AI what should happen next. The wiki says what you change is treated as true in the next turn.
secretInfo. A hidden field the summary pays extra attention to, so facts written there are more likely to last.
Tracked items. A world’s author can track skills, inventory and relationships.

There is a caution in the wiki that applies to anyone who switches models in the middle of a game: moving from a strong model to a cheap one can cause memory problems, because the cheap one misses more detail.

On balance, AI Dungeon hands you a few notes to pin and leaves the rest to the window. Infinite Worlds lets you edit the story itself while you play. If the thing that annoys you most is a story that drifts, the Infinite Worlds tools are closer to a repair kit. We cannot say how well they work in play, because we have not used them.

Models: Who Chooses What

AI Dungeon has a stable of models. Our entry counts eight on the free tier and eighteen on the top plan, from free ones such as Muse, Wayfarer Small 2, Hearthfire and Fable up to Nova, Wayfarer Large, Equinox, Hermes 3 405B and DeepSeek V4 Pro. Many are finetunes Latitude made for stories. Our model guide sorts them by playstyle.

Infinite Worlds lets you pick the storyteller from its main menu. Its community wiki lists 14 active models, under cat names such as Wildcat, Lynx, Smilodon, Leopard and Dolphin. Behind the names, the wiki lists Claude Haiku, Sonnet and Opus models, GPT 4.1, three Gemini models, Hermes 3 405B, Xiaomi MiMo, Aion-2.0 and a custom-trained model. The wiki rates them by instruction following, cost, inventiveness, pace and turn length, and says the ratings are player experience, not measurements.

Two things are worth noticing:

The only model on both lists is Hermes 3 405B. Everything else differs, so the same prompt will read differently.
Infinite Worlds is where the big closed models are. If you want to play on a Claude or Gemini model without setting up your own key, it is one of the few places that offers a menu. AI Dungeon’s list is mostly its own finetunes plus open models.

Both lists change fast. Treat any model name on this page as true on the day we read it.

Cost: Free Forever or Pay for Every Turn

This is the clearest split.

AI Dungeon: the free tier, called Wanderer, has no turn limit on its free models. The paid plans on our entry are:

Plan	Monthly cost	Max context
Wanderer	Free	up to 4k tokens
Journey	$14.99	up to 8k tokens
Legend	$29.99	up to 16k tokens
Mythic	$49.99	up to 32k tokens
Ultimate	$99.99	up to 32k tokens

What the money buys is better models and more context, not more turns. Our guide to AI Dungeon’s free tier has the detail.

Infinite Worlds: a registered account gets a few free turns a day. Its wiki lists 1 to 3 per model and says the maximum is 3 a day in total. After that, every turn costs credits. The wiki says the cost depends on the words sent to the AI and the words it writes back, including your tracked items and hidden fields, so a busy world costs more than a plain one. Its rough scale is 30 to 60 credits a turn on the cheapest models and 150 or more on the dearest, and an image costs about 3 to 5 credits. You buy credits in steps from a button in the account. We could not see the price of a credit, because it is shown inside the account and not on the public pages, so we cannot turn those numbers into money.

The wiki says the developer has refused a subscription, because he could not cover the costs without unfair pricing or outside money. The site’s FAQ says almost all of the money from credits goes on paying for the AI.

So: if you play every day, AI Dungeon costs less, and it can cost nothing. If you play a few turns on a strong model, Infinite Worlds charges only for what you use. For how the common pricing styles compare, see what AI RPGs cost.

Worlds and Building Your Own

Both games are libraries as much as they are engines. A lot of the fun is somebody else’s setup.

AI Dungeon has a big library of player-made adventures and a scenario editor. You can add Story Cards, set an Author’s Note, and use scripting where a scenario’s author wants rules. Our guides cover scenario creation and scripting.

Infinite Worlds is built around its world builder, which the developer calls its most unique feature. You describe an adventure in anything from a few words to many paragraphs and a generator writes the instructions, skills and player characters. You can then edit all of it: objectives, victory and defeat conditions, tracked items, triggers that change the instructions when something happens, an author style, and instructions for the pictures. A scripting language, PawScript, was added on 14 July 2026. When you start a game it copies the world, so editing the original later does not change a game in progress.

One point is specific to Infinite Worlds. It has a referral scheme. If another player follows your link to a world and plays it, you earn 3% of the credits they spend, 5% of what they spend on that world, or 10% if you made the world. With 50,000 bonus credits or more you can cash out at $50 per 50,000 through PayPal, according to the site’s FAQ. So a link to a world posted on a forum may be a referral link, and a world’s author may have a reason to promote it. That is not a fault, but you should know it.

Rules and Fairness

AI Dungeon scores Mechanical Depth — 2 and Determinism & Fairness — 2 on our methodology. It has no rules unless a scenario adds them, and the AI decides every result, so there is nothing to be unfair and nothing you can lose. Our guide to difficulty in AI RPGs explains why that is the most common failure in the category.

Infinite Worlds says the opposite on its front page: you can do whatever you want, “or at least you can try to”, because your character might fail. A world can carry objectives, victory and defeat conditions, and skills. Whether a model enforces them is the question, and we have not tested it, so we will not say. The honest comparison is that Infinite Worlds gives world authors more places to put rules, and AI Dungeon leaves them to scripting.

Where You Can Play and Who Can Play

AI Dungeon plays in a browser, has apps for iPhone and Android and has a Steam version. App stores rate it 12+ on Apple and Teen on Google Play.

Infinite Worlds runs in a browser. We found no app linked from its site. Its terms, last updated on 1 October 2024, say you must be at least 18 and have an account with an email address. They say you keep the rights to what you generate, and they prohibit content that glorifies or encourages self-harm, suicide or violence, and real-world illegal activity. Community worlds carry separate “Mature” and “NSFW” filters.

What We Cannot Tell You

How good Infinite Worlds’ writing is. We have not played it. A model name tells you little about how a particular world plays.
What a credit costs. The price is inside the account.
Whether its model list is current. It comes from a community wiki that keeps its own list of pages needing updates.
How its editing tools hold up in a long game. Plausible, untested.
A score. Infinite Worlds is not on our board, and the 2.6 is AI Dungeon’s alone.

Which Should You Choose?

Choose AI Dungeon if:

You want to play without paying, and without counting turns.
You play on a phone or on Steam as well as in a browser.
You want the biggest library of adventures and the most guides.
You are under 18. (Infinite Worlds does not allow you to register.)

Choose Infinite Worlds if:

You want to pick a strong closed model and pay only for the turns you take.
You like editing the story as you play, and want a hidden field the memory pays attention to.
You want to build worlds with triggers and tracked items.
You are 18 or over and happy with a browser.

A simple test: do you want to play a lot, or play well? If you want a lot of turns for nothing, AI Dungeon. If you want fewer, better-controlled turns on a model you choose, try Infinite Worlds with its free turns first.

If Neither One Fits

Both have the same weak point on our board: the memory is a window, and neither gives you rules that hold. If you want structure and a memory that lasts, look higher on the board. Voyage, made by AI Dungeon’s own studio, has dice and permadeath. Our ranking for long campaigns is the place to start, and AI Dungeon alternatives covers the wider field, including DreamGen, which has a similar free-to-try model with a small memory window.

Checklist

Want to try Infinite Worlds? Make an account and use your free turns on a cheap model first.
Want to try AI Dungeon? Start on the free tier and read the per-model context before you pay.
Story drifting on Infinite Worlds? Turn on Storyteller Mode, or put the fact in secretInfo.
Story drifting on AI Dungeon? Pin it in a Story Card or Plot Essentials.
Switching models mid-game on Infinite Worlds? Go from strong to cheap with care.
Subscribing to AI Dungeon? Check the plan on its website. The top tiers are web-only.
Under 18? AI Dungeon, not Infinite Worlds.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Infinite Worlds better than AI Dungeon?

They suit different players. AI Dungeon has a free tier with no turn limit and runs in a browser, on iPhone, on Android and on Steam. Infinite Worlds gives you a choice of strong models and editing tools, but you pay credits for almost every turn after a small daily allowance. We have played and scored AI Dungeon, 2.6 out of 5. We have not played Infinite Worlds, so it has no score.

Is Infinite Worlds free like AI Dungeon?

Not in the same way. AI Dungeon’s free tier has no turn limit, on its free models. Infinite Worlds gives a registered account a few free turns each day, and its community wiki says the most is 3 a day however you split them across models. After that you buy credits. The wiki says there is no subscription.

Which has better memory, AI Dungeon or Infinite Worlds?

Neither remembers everything. AI Dungeon sends the AI a context window, which depends on the model and plan, from about 4,000 tokens on the free tier, and gives you Story Cards, Plot Essentials and an Author’s Note. Infinite Worlds sends the last 2 to 8 turns word for word plus a summary that loses detail, and gives you Storyteller Mode and a hidden secretInfo field to fix it.

Which has more AI models, AI Dungeon or Infinite Worlds?

AI Dungeon lists eight models on the free tier and eighteen on its top plan, mostly in-house finetunes plus some open models. The Infinite Worlds community wiki lists 14, including Claude, GPT and Gemini models. Both lists change, so check the model menu in each.

Does Infinite Worlds have an app like AI Dungeon?

We found no app linked from the Infinite Worlds site on 23 October 2026. It runs in a browser. AI Dungeon runs in a browser, has iPhone and Android apps and has a Steam version.

Can I build my own world in both?

Yes. AI Dungeon has scenarios, Story Cards and scripting. Infinite Worlds has a world builder with a generator, tracked items, triggers and a scripting language called PawScript, added on 14 July 2026. In both you can publish your work for other players.

Which is cheaper, AI Dungeon or Infinite Worlds?

For heavy play, AI Dungeon, because the free tier has no turn limit. Its paid plans run from $14.99 to $99.99 a month and buy better models and more context. Infinite Worlds charges credits per turn, and the wiki says a turn costs about 30 to 60 credits on the cheapest models and 150 or more on the dearest. We could not see the price of a credit.

AI Dungeon’s score is the one published on its entry in our directory, on our seven-axis methodology. Infinite Worlds is not scored. We have not played it, and what we say about it was read from its own site and its community wiki on 23 October 2026. AI Dungeon, Infinite Worlds and the models named on this page are third-party products, and all names are used nominatively. Arcanum is independent and is not affiliated with Latitude, Friendly Fox Games or any model maker named here.