40 Best iOS Games Of All Time

11. Threes!

Release date: February 5, 2014

Developer: Sirvo

Publisher: Sirvo

If imitation really is the sincerest form of flattery, the small dev team at Sirvo should have been blushing nonstop after bringing Threes! to the market in 2014. Instead, the game became one of the case studies in mobile game cloning, with 1024 and 2048 popping up in its wake and stealing much of the game’s thunder (and revenue, no doubt). The old adage about something that is “often imitated, never duplicated” turned out to be only half right in this case.

Nevertheless, we’re looking to give the proper credit where it’s due. You won’t find a puzzle game experience more distilled than the one you’ll find in Threes!, which somehow manages to make math fun. Seriously, even kids (and yeah, adults too) who normally recoil in horror at the thought of some maths typically find themselves hooked by the simple challenge of this game.

On top of that, its minimalist visual design could easily fool you into thinking that it doesn’t have much personality, but that’s not the case. All you need to do is play with headphones on for a few minutes to understand what I mean.

Overall, we’d call Threes! a triumph of iOS game design, albeit one that probably didn’t get its just due after the storm that followed it. That’s just one of the reasons we dislike cloners. A pox on your development houses, we say!

Next: Real Racing 2