Independent play 3 year old

[Jumpbashcrashbangzonk]

3 year old used to be great at independent play but has very recently become a lot clingier and wants me to play with him a lot. It's utterly tedious and repetitive. I understand the value in it for us for both (to an extent!) but I honestly can't stand it, especially in its current iteration!

Does anyone else just tell their child "no, I don't want to play right now because I'm doing <insert literally anything else to avoid playing>"? I do play with him but I keep it to an absolute minimum so maximum of 1 hour a day on days he's not at nursery. We do plenty of other things together, especially outdoors, but I just don't want to play.

When I tell him firmly that I will not be playing at the moment he does go off and play alone. I get moments of guilt, but honestly... fuck it! I hope I'm setting him up to play well alone like I did growing up- my dad took me out a lot and my mum did lots of baking and crafts with me. But neither of them were down on the floor playing with toys with me, and I don't feel I missed out on anything. We had and still have a great relationship. I've never thought "I wish they played with me more"

Hmm, well, the things that have kept mine entertained independently...
A digger, a dumper and a pile of decorative pebbles
Magnadraw with shape stamps
Any toy characters that they can watch on tv and then reenact at the same time

Don't expect them to build towers, pretend cook or fight dinosaurs by themselves.

There's nothing my child won't play by himself thankfully. He's very imaginative and chatty so he has no problem setting up elaborate small world play and chatting away about his own story lines for ages, playing with kinetic sand for ages with little diggers, or racing little cars on his car track and so on. I'm just finding I need to tell him to go and play by himself more often than I used to and he's getting a quite clingy. I just can't play these sorts of games for hours on end. I feel myself dozing off!