Threes

Three's is a small Macintosh puzzle game by M. Conrad (Mike) Tilstra, in which the player slides differently coloured pegs into matching rows or columns. As soon as a row or column is filled with same-coloured pegs it locks permanently; the puzzle is solved when every peg is locked into a like-coloured line.

Gameplay

Macintosh Garden summarises the game as "a puzzle game in which you line up different icons into rows or columns. Be careful though, once a group of icons is in a line they can't be moved. The object of the game is to get all icons that look a like in the same line." The author adds that "it is a simple idea that is harder to do than it sounds."

Version 3.0.0

Version 3.0.0 is a complete rewrite of the game in Java. The author notes it "works best on MacOSX, but should work on any system with a JavaVM," marking the title's transition from a classic Mac puzzler into a cross-platform Java program.

Author and history

The game was written by M. Conrad Tilstra (tadpol@mac.com), with the original 68k release dated by Macintosh Garden to 1994 and supporting System 7.0 through 7.6 (with later compatibility on Mac OS 9). The 3.0.0 Java rewrite shipped as threes-300.hqx via Info-Mac.

Identity

This Three's is unrelated to the 2014 mobile puzzle hit of the same name; it is a peg-locking logic puzzle from the classic Mac shareware scene, not a sliding-tile game.