"Have you played Threes yet?"

I rarely ask my wife about whether or not she's played certain games, but Threes, I felt, would mark a great exception. She's more into mobile gaming than I am, dipping her toes into titles that friends of friends recommend and play. She's not a mobile gamer in the hardcore-can't get enough-sense of the term. She just plays when she hits a wall of boredom.

She hadn't heard of Threes yet. I heard of Threes through a good friend on Twitter. I dropped the scratch, because I'm not one of those folks who can't stand paying dollars for mobile games, and it's quickly becoming my go-to time-waster on my phone.

Then my wife dropped some money on it this weekend. We're both playing the game.

Our friends? Well, a few are playing Threes. Others? They're playing 2048. That's the knock-off. It's easier, it's free and there are just about a billion copycat versions of it on the app marketplaces.

"Have you played 2048 yet?"

Which one?

Which brings me to the point of this article. If you've been here at TechnoBuffalo for a while and are familiar with my work, you know mobile gaming doesn't really rate for me. I do it, but I don't love it.

The biggest problem with mobile gaming? It's not the cost, ads or controls, though those things stink. It's not the low rate of discoverability, though that's a big problem too. It's copycats and wannabes, and they are killing the genre.

Okay, So About Threes…

Threes was developed by Sirvo, a small team of three people; Asher Vollmer, Greg Wohlwend and Jimmy Hinson. It released on the iOS platform on Feb. 6. It was ported to Android officially by Hidden Variable Studios on March 12.

Threes is a numbers game, sort of. It's about combining 1 and 2 to make 3, then matching 3s to makes 6s and 6s to make 12s and so on and so forth. The goal is to get the highest numbers possible on this slide puzzle style board.

It's been in development for a long time, complete with plenty of iterations and play tests to make it the best Threes it can possibly be. The Wiki suggests that the team had been working on the game for nearly a year, a long time for a mobile title like this, and it won recognition at festivals like IGF.

Sirvo tried tons of ideas. They even played around with a Sushi styled board, which you can see in this article, before sticking with the final form we all know today.

When Threes released, it did so to a wave of praise from critics and fellow game developers. The official site for the game comes with a few choice quotes, too.

"I love it. It's perfect." -Zach Gage – Spelltower "Simple, elegant, maddening." – Adam Saltsman – Canabalt

It's a great game. It also costs money, something a lot of mobile gamers refuse to fork over for their gaming fix. Threes normally sells for, you guessed it, three bucks. It's on sale right now for two, but three is the standard.

Some might say that that's this game's biggest downfall. The fact that the developers worked on Threes for over a year, released it and had the audacity to charge nearly as much as a Chai Latte at Starbucks is really bad, I guess.