Threes! is the Flappy Bird of good games

There are multitudinous great games released every year (every week!) on mobile devices. Though Xbox and PlayStation (and to a lesser extent, Wii U) get much of the studio investment for paid games, from mobile platforms like iOS and Android the casual gamer has risen.

One such addictive casual game, released this week for iOS, is Threes!. From the makers of Ridiculous Fishing and Puzzlejuice, Threes! is, according to TouchArcade’s Eli Hodapp, “the perfect mobile game,” and I’d have to agree. It doesn’t rely on twitchy fingers, but it can (and likely will, when you’re in the zone) be played quickly; it isn’t necessarily difficult, but it is all-consuming, like Dots for the patient crowd.

The game is extremely simple: you have a board divided into 16 rectangles, each one with a place for a numbered tile. You begin with several numbers, 1, 2 and 3. The goal of the game is to combine tiles to create multiples of three; the only two tiles that can be added are 1 and 2 which, together, form a three. From there, your aim is to combine multiples of three together, so two 3’s become 6, two 6’s become 12 and so on. There is no time limit; there is only one game mode. The catch, and the difficulty, comes from not being able to move just one tile at a time. The entirety of the board’s tiles must shift with you, unless, of course, you hit a wall. The strategy and nuance involved in gaining high scores will be, like in Tetris, anticipating what move to perform with a keen eye on the following tile. Each time you move, another tile enters the board until there are no more moves.

It took me about five minutes to get the hang of Threes!, and an entire night to learn that I still have a lot to learn. At $1.99 (for a limited time), Threes! is a glorious example of an addictive and in-app purchase-free mobile game that, unlike Flappy Bird, won’t get boring quickly. It’s iOS-only, at least for now.

[source]App Store[/source]