- It’s been a weird and awesome couple of months. Our expectations for our tiny game were well, fairly tiny. Basically, we hoped it’d do better than Puzzlejuice. It did. By a lot. It’s still hard to address the world’s response with something beyond a wide-eyed daze but essentially we couldn’t be more thrilled. Duh.
But there’s another side of that daze that we wish to talk about. The rip-offs.
Interresting enouth Shamus did a clone of Threes for the simple sake to analyse how it work and compared it to his version of 2048 and build some AI to play it. His conclusion was that Threes was too random. In the end, it's not that bad, if the "corner strategy" (up-left alternatively, then right when stuck) get you an easy win in 2048.
I've been playing 2048 for about a week now, since that's the first of the many clones I found. It's pretty amazing that these games have picked up so much popularity so rapidly. A day or so after hearing about it I randomly stumbled across people playing it. Even if they think 2048 is broken and threes is not, it still has the qualities that make it successful. You learn it quick, you find strategies, and you beat your high-score almost every game until you get 2048. It looses some appeal after you beat it once, but how long are you going to be entertained by stacking numbers anyways?