Threes! (Sirvo, 2014, iOS)

Back from a vacation to Northern Michigan, and ready to finish off my series on puzzle games.

Dots is initially great in its simplicity, but as I mentioned last week, one can only get so good at the basic game before you hit a ceiling, where the need to move your fingers as quickly as possible competes with any technique you have for generating squares.  And while I don't object in principle to micro-transactions in iOS games, when they're used appropriately, the idea of buying (or earning, through repeated play) "cheats" totally subverts the idea of any real accomplishment.

Threes! has none of these problems.  It's hands-down the greatest "Tetris-like" ever made.  The idea is to match numbered tiles as they emerge on a grid, using a simple mechanic whereby tiles can be pressed together against the edge.  Tiles with high numbers can merge when they match each other, creating a single tile with double the value.  However, the game mostly sends you 2's and 1's, which can only merge with each other to create the titular 3's.  Although the game gives you a score, the real goal is to attempt to create the highest-valued tiles you can, before the grid fills up and you run out of moves.

As you might guess, this involves a fair amount of strategy, and a strong understanding of how the game generates new tiles.  Unlike Dots, there is no time element, which means that games of Threes! can be quite long, especially as you get better at the game.  But knowing these strategies, the principles of which can be learned in fifteen minutes, are no guarantor of success by any means.  What really floored me is that, over a series of ten to twenty games, I was getting better without
really knowing why.  I knew the strategies when I could barely make a 96 tile, but with incremental changes in my tactics and a steadily improving instinct for what a good grid looks like, I was eventually able to get a whopping 768.  If that doesn't make for a good puzzle game, I don't what does.

A couple more observations about Threes!:

1)  The developers posted an astounding wealth of information about the development of this game, which took 14 months in total.  An astonishing amount of that time was spent developing the aesthetics of the game.  Instead of desiging these aesthetics as a "shell" for the core game, the mechanics evolved along with the aesthetics.  I find this remarkable, especially I don't much care for these aesthetics.  It's cute that the tiles have faces that wink at you and such, but it's extremely irritating when they chatter away at you, even going so far as to complain when you take too long in moving (fortunately, that feature can be turned off).  Also, the idea that I would create higher-ranked tiles just so that I could read their pithy descriptions is absurd.

2)  I was astonished to discover that a number of people in my department had not heard of Threes!, but had played its clone 2048.  I have not played this game, but a quick look at its description and some reviews suggests that it is not nearly as complex or fine-tuned.  I can only surmise that its popularity comes from the fact that it's free, and also that the horribly-designed App Store means that its popularity is self-perpetuating irregardless of quality.