The addictive iOS game, Threes, comes to Android

With the release of Wind-up Knight 2 and now Threes, there is likely to be a significant dip in productivity for Canadian Android users this week.

Threes was released last month on iOS to immediate acclaim, popularity and, inevitably, addiction. Its simplicity belies an extremely engrossing and complicated game, where tiles must be added to create multiples of threes. Strategies abound on how to combine tiles in the right order for maximum points and minimum waste, but there doesn’t seem to be a right or wrong way to play the game, which has led to its incredible popularity: this is a game for everyone.

The Android version emerges barely a month after the iOS version, and comes courtesy of developer Hidden Variable, the minds behind popular Android games Tic Tactics and Bag It!. Developed using the cross-platform Unity engine, Threes for Android plays just as well as its iOS counterpart, but the Retina assets seem to have made the jump, too. Looking at the numbers on a Nexus 5 reveals aliasing, a result of poor scaling from the iPhone’s 1154×640 resolution. Perhaps in a future version, the team will create programmable vector assets for the Android version, but this is good enough for now.

Threes is a great game on any screen size, and proves that you don’t need to engage in the insidious free-to-play marketing tactics to lure in users; instead, all you need is an interesting premise, compelling gameplay, and a team of creators committed to its craft.

The game is on sale for $2.21CDN ($1.99USD) for a limited time.

[source]Google Play[/source]