Triple Town is an adorable and engaging puzzle game from Spry Fox that is available in a variety of formats. It may also be a cutting edge DARPA experiment with hypnosis and/or time travel, but more on that later. As they say on Futurama, Triple Town is “refreshingly addictive!”
Free Puzzle Game
There are enough “match 3″ puzzle games out there that they are now a genre as established as first-person shooters, role playing games, and real-time strategy games. Unlike some matching games that include a plot to set themselves apart, the goal in Triple Town is simple: Build a town.
You fill an empty board with matched objects that become increasingly complex. Three grasses make a shrub, and shrubs turn into trees, which become huts, and so on. Since the final placement of the complicated objects depends on where you placed the simpler items that made them, you advance through careful planning and crazy good luck.
And did I mention the bears? You have to place them on the board, and they wander through open spaces to block you from creating matches. Ninja bears are just as spiteful and anti-progress as regular bears, but they can teleport.
Games that Save You from Yourself
Triple Town is free to play — to a point. The Android version of the game, available through Google Play and Amazon’s App store, gives you 1,500 turns. You recharge about one turn per minute after that, and you can keep a maximum of 150 turns in storage. The end result is enough playtime for you to get into a groove before you run out of turns and consider shelling out a few bucks for the unlimited version.
And that’s a good thing. Left to its own devices, Triple Town is a bewitching time sink that will take hours off your life. A friend of mine, for example, thought he could sneak into the bathroom and play it on his phone at work. He was playing it for so long that the bathroom’s motion sensors shut the lights off, and when he stood up to turn them back on his legs were asleep and he slammed face-first into the stall door.
Let me just stress that this totally didn’t happen to ME, and that I got this bruise on my forehead from a kickboxing match. Also, I’m going to have some angry words with Donald about the energy-saving measures we’ve installed in the office just as soon as I’ve finished this article.
Cute Atmosphere, for a Puzzle Game
Triple Town is cute. It has little people that wander out of their homes (or castles) to chat with each other while waiting for your next move, and cranky bears who roar in frustration when you block their path. Unfortunately, you never get to see the bears maul your town’s inhabitants, but they do scurry for cover every time they hear an angry roar. Little touches bring the game to life without distracting you from the serious business of finding three objects that you can place next to each other.
Triple Town on the Brain
I like Triple Town, and eagerly cram it into any free minute I can find in the day. At this point, it’s coming dangerously close to changing the way I view the world.
Yesterday, I was putting away dishes and felt a stab of disappointment when I stacked three soup bowls. Apparently, I was expecting them to turn into a tureen (not that anyone actually uses tureens these days, I was just hoping to stack three of those to end up with a new dining room table).
In addition to being available in the Amazon and Google Play stores, you can find Triple Town by Spry Fox on G+ and Facebook. Enjoy it, but expect to lose a lot of time.
Tweet
