Threes is the most enjoyable game I’ve had on my iPhone, since the device debuted over 7 years ago. I’ve had 2 or 3 games I’ve played during idle times over the years but Threes is easily the most enjoyable, still almost a year after I started playing it daily.

I play it every night before bed (in dark mode aka inverted colors from Apple’s accessibility options), and occasionally during downtimes in the day. I quickly got to about 20,000 points as my high, but couldn’t really improve beyond that for a few months. I eventually found a Threes playing robot on Twitch.tv that everyone was linking to, since it was playing live games. The bot was easily scoring in the 50-60 thousand point ranges so I watched it for a couple hours and realized it was playing very defensively, and as soon as I changed my game a bit I was getting in the high 20k range. My highest score was about 32k points for the last 6 months. Day after day I tried and tried again, but could never quite get two 768 tiles together.

Today was that day, and after a few games I had a good run going and saw the two 768 tiles were coming together a few moves before it happened. I don’t think two 1536 tiles could ever fit on the small field so I’m happy with getting just one of them. I’ll still play it nightly, though I doubt I come close to this again anytime soon.