I've never been able to get it past the title screen on 4th iPod. Usually crashes during loading, even after a reboot. Works on iPad Mini but isn't perfect there either--slow loading time, and sound often stops working.
A different look on Threes! gameplay So after explaining the scoring system and trying to deduce the theoretically highest score I now return with a different look on Threes! gameplay and a few strategy tips on the side. As all Threeists know, every move adds one tile to the game (either a 1, a 2 or a white tile of increasing value as the game progresses). This fact coupled with the limited size of the field leads to a reassuring conclusion: every game of Threes! has to end eventually because at some point the total value on the board cannot be contained in its 16 fields. The challenge now is to draw this point out as far into the future as possible, or to put it differently: to pack the ever increasing amount of value as compactly as possible. Another way to look at the board is this: merging two tiles together generates a free spot but every move consumes a free spot with the new tile sliding in. In order to "survive" you need to combine more than one pair of tiles per move, on average. You should not confuse this to mean that it is wise to always perform the move which merges the most tiles, looking ahead and preparing is more important than short-sighted progress. Now on to a topic which has come up several times already in this thread and which is key to success in Threes! - controlling where the new tiles slide in. The game is actually quite forthcoming in this regard with displaying the color of the next tile and giving you the choice of move which determines where the new tile can slide in. Look at it this way: the board has 4 rows and 4 columns. With every move one to four of those will move one space in the direction you choose, creating an empty spot at the edge in the process where the new tile can appear. Now if only 1 row/column moves, you will exactly know where the new tile will come in. If two rows/columns move, you have a 50:50 gamble. With three its 1/3:1/3:1/3 and with all four its of course 25:25:25:25. But remember: you have absolute control over which direction you move. Realizing this does not give you perfect control over the new tiles, but it helps a lot. Bonus content - "Murphy's law applied to Threes!" -When you really need that white tile to be a 3, it will be a 6 or higher. -When a new tile can either slide in where you need it or where it will totally mess with you, it chooses the latter way. -When you really need a 1, 2s will spawn like crazy - and vice versa.
I have no tactics. My strategy ability is zero. Yet I love this game. At some point I managed to get over 3000, and was overjoyed. Anyone can enjoy this game, no matter their skill level. I have been impatiently waiting for Dungelot 2, but this and Spell Quest will keep me busy for a long while. A great release week.
And succeeding in 3s means avoiding the situations where these come in to play. As strategic as you can get, one of the great things about 3s is the random nature of the new tiles. My best run (below) came about after quite a few strokes of anti-Murphy luck in getting tiles that allowed me to continue after filling the board.
my top score disappeared from game centre, anyone else had this problem? It was there for several minutes, and I sent out challenges to my friends, but it has now disappeared even though its still recorded in my game.
Finally got a 384 and broke 7000. This was after about 5 straight sub 1500 games. Loving this game and it deserves all the accolades. One question though, does it seem to anyone else the game takes forever to load until you see the t h r e e s come in?
The loading is relative to which idevice you are using. On my ipad air it opens quite fast and fluidly. On my iphone 4 it takes quite awhile and is somewhat choppy.
Wait, people took my zombie comment to be serious? This game rocks. It's electronic crack. Love puzzle games and having bought this I picked up Puzzlejuice. These types of games are perfect for the iphone. ps. could still do with a zombie
When I play this on my iPod Touch 5 there is no audio every few times I start it up. I find it really annoying that you have to go through the "enter your name" process after every single game. Those are my only complaints, great game!
Just noticed a new 60k score on game center, so someone must have got the magical 1536. EDIT: He hacked the game, it wasn't a legit 1536 - https://twitter.com/phix23/status/432265184548507648 To throw my opinion into the "corner vs center" debate, my top score is 21,150, and I play with a mostly top-right corner focused style.
I have a new ipad mini retina. I'd have expected it to load fast. It's not a big deal just surprising it takes so long to load.
v.slow loading of start "threes" and also do i need to save my name every single time ? just do it when its a higher score apart from that great
So isn't this kind of puzzle luck based? Also, is it even possible, realistically speaking, to get anywhere near the best tile (6144)? I like it, but I can't break 2k. I prefer totally skill based games like super hexagon personally.
There is a skill to it actually. It's hard to explain but there def is. Not being rude, but as you can't get passed 2k, while lots have (I have about 9k), then you obviously don't have the skill needed. For example; try to line up the 'next role' with something it will match to, I.e. A red next to a blue, a white next to a three. most of the time this will work. I actually got my high score this way. Yes there is luck involved, but there is in most games!
Looking at Game Center, we get the following distribution of players to highest card: 3: 59,722 (100%) (baseline) 6: 59,679 (99.9%) 12: 59,441 (99.5%) 24: 58,935 (98.7%) 48: 56,854 (95.2%) 96: 52,119 (87.3%) 192: 36,322 (60.8%) 384: 7,600 (12.7%) 768: 225 (0.4%) 1536: 2 (<0.01%) 3072: 1 (<0.01%) 6144: 0 What we can clearly see is that there is a drop-off around 96 and a very sharp one after 192. What this statistic nicely shows is what I suspected already: the difficulty increases exponentially. What that means in layman's terms is this: getting from 96 to 192 is hard but getting from 192 to 384 is about three times harder and the next step is eight times harder than the one before. The reasons for this is that as cards get higher and higher values, it becomes more difficult to line them up for combining and while you are doing this you have less and less space to handle the incoming 1s and 2s. So to answer your question: 6144 is very very difficult but not impossible. It might take more time and more exercise but eventually I think someone will get it. By the way, Mr. Hodapp: if you look into the Game Center lists there is one titled "Highest Card" not "Highest Block" or "Highest Tile". So my calling them cards is absolutely canonical ;-) And one more thing, despite the greeting screen only having 12 spaces and the Game Center leaderboards stopping at 6144, the following graphic might suggest that it could actually go on without limit. The scoring system certainly has no limits although at a tile with k=19 (which displays the number 1,572,864) the score (3^20 = 3,486,784,401) would exceed a 32-bit signed integer. I wonder if the devs accounted for that ever happening...
