Steam the legendary mobile game “Threes” is finally getting a native PC port to celebrate it’s 10th anniversary

[Krvavi Abadas]

launching February 6th.
for those unaware of it’s significance, this was one of the earliest “viral” puzzle games. leading to plenty of other famous examples such as Wordle and Suika Game.
like it’s successors, it was pretty heavily cloned, with variants such as 2048 leading to some strong criticism from the development team.

But why is Threes better? It’s better for us, for our goals. 2048 is a broken game. Something we noticed about this kind of system early on. We wanted players to be able to play Threes over many months, if not years. We both beat 2048 on our first tries. We’d wager most people that have been able to score a 768 or even a 384 in Threes would be able to do the same using the fabled “corner strategy”. You probably could too! Just try tapping “up” then “right” in alternating order until you can’t move. Then press left. You may not get to a 2048, but you might just see your highest score ever.

When an automated script that alternates pressing up and right and left every hundreth time can beat the game, then well, that's broken. Is Threes a better game? We think so. To this day, only about 6 people in the world have ever seen a 6144 and nobody in the world has yet to “beat” Threes. But that’s what’s better to us as game designers. We worked really hard to create a simple game system with interesting complexity that you can play forever. You know, “simple to learn, impossible to master”. That old chess-nut…

Threes was originally released on iOS, with ports to the other contemporary phones (Android, Windows Phone.) later.
but one particularly unusual port was the game’s release on Xbox One, the system at one point had the ability to “pin” smaller applications on screen at all times. which could be freely swapped to at any point.
the idea with this port was that you could quickly play a game or two while waiting for something else (getting stuck in a matchmaking queue for example.) as a quick diversion.
Microsoft sadly removed this feature back in 2017. leaving this version to languish in obscurity.

and while there is an official web browser version of the game, this Steam version marks the first time the game is natively running on PC.