Triple Town
Review

Triple Town (2010) is a puzzle game where you expand an empire by building cities in a limited space. You combine lower value pieces into better ones to improve your city and make best use of available space. It's simple and quick to pick up but requires practice to excel at.

You place shrub tiles on the 6-by-6 play area. As you do you aim to combine three adjacent tiles together to make it into a single new item. For example 3 shrubs make a bush, 3 bushes make a tree, and so on. This allows you to keep your board clear as well as make new objects.

Using this simple mechanic, the aim is to create a city with trees and houses. While you do this, bears try and block your progress, and you must block them with tiles to hem them in before it's too late. The round ends when there are no free tiles left.

The game has spawned a whole genre of "merge" games, and focuses on relaxing fun rather than challenging play. It's a great introduction to strategy games as well as being a novel puzzle. Still, to get the best score you need to learn the mechanics and plan carefully.

Our examiner, Ben Kendall, first checked Triple Town 2 years ago. It was re-examined by Jo Robertson and updated 2 years ago.