Playing Triple Town is like hang-gliding over Hell.

Once upon a time there was a small group of friends who occasionally met up to play a campaign game of notoriously hefty dungeon-crawler Descent. The down-time during the evil Overlord’s turn was considerable, and people had brought along diverse electronic gewgaws to consult rules and generally entertain us in the meantime. I must have been looking particularly distracted during one of the dead zones, because one of my “friends” – although I use that term very loosely now – thrust an iPad into my hands to keep me occupied. This iPad had Triple Town loaded, and ten minutes later they had to physically pry it away from my hands because I was too busy frantically pawing at the screen to pay any attention to the actual game we’d all turned up to play that day.

This curious phenomenon was largely down to the mesmerising effects all modern consumer electronics have on those who are unused to them. The touchscreen technology of the iPad – and Apple devices in general – is specifically designed to seduce the unwary user into thinking it is the most awesome thing since that one species of bipedal monkey creatures decided that using sharpened rocks to beat the shit out of each other was far more efficient than doing it by hand. It didn’t really matter what I was playing on that iPad. I could have been browsing a spreadsheet on that thing and it would have had the same effect. And I think this is something that is known about and exploited by the people who develop games for the iPad and other tablet devices, since once you strip it of its glamorous little package Triple Town is an astoundingly shallow game.

The core concept is good. It’s a match-three game with a bit of a twist: you put down a variety of stuff on the board trying to make a group of three identical items, and instead of your matched items disappearing, as in Bejeweled, they instead combine to form a new higher-tier item in the place of your last played item that scores you more points. The conceit is that you’re building a city. The basic item is grass; three grass combines to make a bush; three buses combine to make a tree; three trees combine to make a hut and so on. The trick of the game is to place your crappy low tier items in places that will eventually lead them to form valuable high-tier items — incidentally clearing the way for you to put some new stuff down, which is important because the only way to end the game is to completely fill the entire board with stuff.

And this will be a sad occasion, because games of Triple Town can take upwards of an hour, you won’t lose them through any real fault of your own, and once they’re over the only thing you can really do is start another game of Triple Town. Tackling these complaints in order: making a single simple tier 4 hut will require you to match 81 pieces of grass. This takes some time, even though you can skip a few steps when you’re lucky enough to have a bush or a tree come up in your item-placement box. Getting to the point of having a few tier 7 items dotted about takes even longer (2,187 pieces of grass, although the wildcard crystals will let you avoid 729 of those if you value your sanity). It’s a natural result of the game’s exponential nature, but I swear I’ve had games of Civilization¹ that were quicker to play than Triple Town is.

The second two issues are rather more insidious. Being an import from mobile devices such as the iPad, Triple Town is very into trying to turn its simple yet addictive puzzle base into a platform for people to spend as much money as possible putting down bushes and grass. That one paragraph I spent describing the game earlier? That’s all the game you get out of Triple Town. The rest of it is the attempts at monetisation, which are glaringly obvious even though I already paid money for it on Steam and they have (in theory) been removed. Present throughout the game is a shop in which I can spend fake in-game money earned from playing the game to buy bonus items that I can put down whenever I want, and in a game where you’re pretty much at the mercy of whatever the game’s item RNG spits out at you these can make all the difference between a game that finishes early after “just” twenty minutes and your all-time high score. I have absolutely no doubt that in the app version of the game the option exists to pay actual, real money for these bushes and crystals and clumps of grass – certainly the rate at which you get the fake money is, even in the paid version, laughably slow. Triple Town is the first puzzle game I’ve played where you had to grind money for two games so that you could play with maximum efficiency in one. It’s been intentionally crippled to make you spend money on it, and that’s something that translates through even though I already spent money on it. This is unforgiveable.

Even though Triple Town has a fairly addictive core gameplay mode it’s nothing that a flash game couldn’t also achieve (in fact I believe there is also a flash version of Triple Town, with grasping monetisation features fully intact) and if you ever want to move outside of that basic concept all you’re going to find is an awful lot of nothing.  There’s a few different maps/boards, but beyond that all that exists is a horrific Farmville “capital city” thing where you match production buildings to create higher-tier production buildings and then come back every twenty hours (or whatever) to collect their output.

The thing that gets me about Triple Town, and that I can’t really get over, is that despite being a game sold for an up-front cost on Steam it still provides a brief glimpse of the blasted, joyless landscape of mobile apps and Facebook games. I don’t play those games². Indeed, I go out of my way to avoid them these days, and Triple Town is a good reminder as to why. It’s a fun diversion for a few hours, but the whole time I was playing it I had this uneasy feeling that it was going to ask me to get my wallet out again. While this might be part and parcel of the free-to-play phenomenon it is something I had not hitherto experienced in a paid-for game, and that’s more than enough to consign it to the Pit in my eyes. Triple Town can rot in the Fourth Circle with the rest of the greedy and avaricious. I have better things to do with my time.

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