The Muted Majesty of "Threes," a Calmingly Addictive Puzzle Game

The concept of "achievements" or "trophies" is one of those things that exists in video games and few other places save, say, the Olympics or middle school athletics. Microsoft popularized them with the Xbox 360 when it began to give virtual markers of success that attached to a gamer's Xbox Live ID, but it quickly flooded the system to such an extent that all but the most hard-to-reach achievements became meaningless. You can now regular unlock an achievement by, say, watching the opening cut scene of a game or, as I discovered one day when I was couch-ridden with the flu, by binge-watching episodes of Netflix.

I'm fixating on this detail because it's a frustrating sign of how video games, in their quest for mass appeal, have lost their competitive spirit. Instead of reserving awards for things that take legitimate dedication, like finding the Knights of the Round materia in Final Fantasy 7, Xbox Live essentially created the "everybody gets the trophy day" award from that classic episode of The Simpsons. It's a sign of bloated excess, a loose and lazy form of the semi-corporate weapon of "gamification" that leads to disinterest for the majority of players.

I was surprised, then, to discover one of the best trophy systems I've seen in recent memory in a game that just launched on the iOS app store, of all places. It's called Threes, and it's an excellent puzzle game that had the misfortune of launching around the same time that Flappy Bird first began to take off.

This has put Asher Vollmer, the game's creator, in something of a tough spot. "Everybody is comparing Threes to Flappy Bird," he told me. But the comparison doesn't really do either game justice. They might share a certain affinity for giving their players a challenge so hefty that making even the most incremental of advances feels important.

But what's special about Threes is that it approaches the whole concept of difficulty and failure from the opposite direction. Vollmer explained that he wanted to give the game a freeform so players could peruse it at their own speed. He realized that after seeing how his first game, Puzzlejuice, stressed some players out with its colorful combination of Tetris and Boggle-like gameplay mechanics.

"When I made Puzzle juice and I was very proud of it," Vollmer said. "But I also realized that people get physically uncomfortable when you add any sort of timer to a game."

In Threes, therefore, he made the challenge more timeless and much more simple. Or at least, it seems that way, until you really start to dig in. The game is set on a 4x4 grid peppered with a number of tiles of different numerical values. You shuffle the tiles by swiping upwards, downwards, or to either side. The catch is that swiping one way moves all of the tiles in that direction, and each time you move another tile is plopped on the board. The game ends once the board fills up to the point that there are no more moves available, so you have to find ways to keep combining the tiles already there.

The goal, therefore, is first to make threes by combining blue and red tiles, which have a value of one and two respectively. After that, the challenge is to combine tiles of the same value to increase their size. Three and three go to together to make six, six and six to make 12, 12 and 12 to make 24, and on it goes. It feels like trying to pack some sort of magical suitcase where the clothes you're stuffing in keep getting bigger and bigger, requiring an ever more elaborate folding process.

All of this would be compelling on its own for the kind of math geeks that love Sudoku or have figured out the perfect way to hack a game like Tetris or Minesweeper. But I'm about as far as a technology journalist can get from a math geek, and I still can't stop playing this game.

That's because where Threes truly excels is in its aesthetic approach. Vollmer tells me he was inspired by another hit tile-based puzzle game, Drop7. It's easy to see the similarities between the two, but Drop7 just looks and feels like a more drab, bare-bones experience of a game. All you have in the gray, lifeless world of its grid is the numbers.

The tiles in Threes, in comparison, take on a life of their own. Off-white in an eggish sort of way, they all look like a cross between piano keys and rectangular cubes of tofu. The best part is how they all talk to you as you're playing the game. Each number has a tiny face etched onto it that blinks and chirps periodically, making the simple act of touching the screen a joy in its own right. "Nope!" the high-pitched threes titter adorably when you try to slide the screen in a direction already blocked up with tiles. A 24 greets you with a dopey "hi guys!" All of them sigh and grin expectantly when placed next to a tile of the same value, nudging you to make another move.

The first time you manage to combine two tiles and thus unlock a new character, Threes gives you a short and silly introduction to tell you who they are. The six, for instance, is named "Thumbert" and is described as "Too young to play sports and too big to fit in the jungle gym. He finds friends in the clouds." They only get weirder as the numbers go higher: 96 growls at you through a mouth full of fangs, and 192 is a DJ for some reason. Not since Battlestar Galactica have a series of numbers had this much personality.

Vollmer tells me that he settled on the characters present in Threes after a long back and forth with Greg Wohlwend, the artist on the game. Wohlwend was "super set on putting as much personality as possible" into Threes, while Vollmer "took the bad guy role, trying to take the personality out so you could understand the board." Ultimately, they settled on the tiny faces because Vollmer felt they were just small enough that they could almost be overlooked.

That's a perfect description for the subtle beauty of Threes—everything in the game is a joy to behold, a pleasure to touch. But it all remains just slight enough to be ignored as well. This makes sense given the market in which it arrives: mobile games are designed to be unobtrusive experiences, played during the bustle of a morning commute or the spare few minutes spent procrastinating or sitting on the toilet. But for me at least, the best parts of Threes are the ones that many players won't notice at all—the soothing, lighthearted music, the snarky one-liners, and the silly voices with which they're delivered.

I ask Vollmer how he feels about this. He's come to terms with it in the sense that he designs mobile games with the expectation that nobody will, say, play the game with the sound on. But for the people who don't play it on mute, well, "we're basically rewarding them."

"There are a lot of layers there," he added. "As invested as people want to be, they can be."

And that's where the achievements come in. There are all these wonderful characters, perched on the menu screen every time I open up Threes, reminding me of the small sense of victory I got every time I met one of them for the first time. I've only ever made to 192, so there are still five more blocks ahead of me. And even though I'm terrible at puzzle games, I want to keep fighting my way through Threes. Just to see what comes next.