Threes

The player slides numbered tiles on a four-by-four grid to combine addends and multiples of three. For example, ones and twos merge to become a single "three" tile, two threes merge into "six", and two sixes merge into "12". Swiping the screen up, down, left, or right moves all of the tiles one square (if possible) on the grid in that direction and adds a new tile to the grid in the same direction. The color of the incoming tile is shown onscreen.

Players can preview moves by sliding the grid without letting go. Each kind of number tile has its own personality, and new kinds of number tiles are introduced with a screen full of confetti when first unlocked.

Threes was conceived by game designer Asher Vollmer, who worked on the game with artist Greg Wohlwend and composer Jimmy Hinson. The three, as Sirvo LLC, had previously collaborated on the 2012 iOS word game Puzzlejuice. Wohlwend had worked on games including Ridiculous Fishing and Hundreds. Threes development began before Ridiculous Fishing's March 2013 release.

Vollmer presented an idea similar to the final product in its simplicity: pair tiles as multiples of three. Vollmer considered Drop7 an inspiration for the game, and played it for two years before making his game. The first Threes prototype was written in a single night. With Wohlwend, the two-man development team spent at least half a year of the game's 14-month development iterating on this main idea.

The game received what video game review score aggregator Metacritic described as "universal acclaim", with a 92% rating based on 19 reviews. Eurogamer and TouchArcade awarded the game perfect scores, with the latter calling Threes "about as close as it gets to a perfect mobile game". It was an honorable mention in the 2014 Independent Games Festival's Excellence in Design category. The game reached the top of the Apple App Store paid app sales chart shortly after its release.

Re/code reported that it "dominated" the chart in the following weeks and became one of the 25 highest grossing apps on the App Store. It later won a 2014 Apple Design Award and was named Apple's best iPhone game of 2014. E. E.

Outside developers released games that closely resembled Threes within weeks of its release, including a browser-based version, an "unofficial sort-of-knockoff" Android app (Fives), and another iPhone game, 1024, which advertised itself as "No need to pay for Threes" and was later ported to a browser version. A March 2014 clone of 1024, the browser game 2048, became popular and spawned "dozens of parodies". Journalists, including those at the Los Angeles Times, did not acknowledge the game's connection to Threes.

The Threes team was "puzzled" by the popularity of these releases, especially those that did not credit their game for the idea. They criticized 2048's game design and compared the game as the Commander Keen to their Super Mario Bros. in a 45,000-word post outlining their full 14-month development process. Gamasutra's Leigh Alexander described the situation as a "unique tragedy". Threes designer Vollmer would try to remove the clones from online stores but ultimately accepted that the game would be copied and resolved that his future games would not share the same fate.