I heard about Triple Town from three different people and via three different social networks this week. That’s the kind of viral marketing you simply can’t buy. Happily, Spry Fox’s ingenious strategy-puzzler is worth every tweet and every wall post.
Spry Fox looks like an interesting outfit, incidentally: a collaboration between Daniel Cook, the co-creator of Realm Of The Mad God, and David Edery, who you might know as the former worldwide games portfolio manager for XBLA. They both seem like worryingly smart people, and Triple Town is a worryingly smart game, taking the ancient foundations of the match-three formula and building something so quietly inventive on top of it that, if I’m being honest, I’m still getting to grips with it all.
The basics are pretty simple, though. You’ve been given a plot of land, and your task is to develop it by linking together groups of three or more of the same item: three patches of grass, say, or three trees. The twist, however, is that successful matches don’t disappear so much as evolve. Three matched grasses will give you a single bush, three matched bushes will give you a tree. Each evolution increases your score, and your ultimate ambition isn’t to clear the screen but rather to match your items so that every square of the board is eventually filled with something of optimal value. (Some people have taken it even further, of course, going for high-scoring items while simultaneously fitting them into an attractive and highly symmetrical town layout. These people, as far as I’m concerned, are wizards.)
In other words, it’s a match-three game in which you have to think about time as well as space. In fact, you have to think about them both at once, working out, say, where your grass needs to go to ensure that the bush it will turn into is right where you need it to be in order to link it up with a bunch of other bushes so that you can turn them into that tree you need. Somewhere along the line nature gives way to civilisation, as trees form little log huts. Beyond that, domesticity turns to splendour, as churches become castles. It’s no wonder that people are referring to Triple Town as the Civilization of match-three games.
I’m still sufficiently caught up in the entry-level logistics of trying to maximise my score and make the most of the simple on-board economy that I haven’t given much thought yet to the wider implications. Over on his blog, however, Cook has posted a very interesting article in which he suggests that Triple Town is ultimately a game about colonisation. Even after just a few hours of play, there’s already a fascinating relationship between creation and destruction emerging, as you endlessly recycle trees to make huts, or kill wandering bears and then transform their tombstones into churches.
Regardless of the ideas it’s ultimately channelling, it all adds up to one of the most dynamic match-three games I’ve ever played. And speaking of dynamism, as Triple Town cruises through the first days of its beta, it’s exciting to think that we’re only just starting to see Spry Fox evolve its own design.