If you’ve ever fretted about how much you’ve achieved in life, you might want to look away now. The story behind Happy Portions is liable to get you down.
It all started when Wellington twins Amelie and Finn Barker were playing tic-tac-toe in a restaurant. Insufficiently challenged, they sketched out a more complicated version of the game on a menu and played that instead. Later they fleshed the concept out on a whiteboard and decided to make an app, before outsourcing the coding work to a local developer.
Amelie and Finn Barker were eight years old at the time.
The result was Happy Portions, a twist on tic-tac-toe that’s so ingeniously simple you’ll be amazed you haven’t seen it before.
How it works
It works like this: you play on a 9×9 grid, as with ordinary tic-tac-toe, but each of the squares on the grid has a circle in it divided up into two, three, four, or more portions depending on the difficulty level. You take turns tapping on these portions to fill them with your colour.
The aim is still to make horizontal, vertical, or diagonal lines, but in Happy Portions you’re lining up portions rather than whole grid squares, and because there are several portions in each grid square you can have multiple lines, or points.
As an added twist, you can rotate the circles in the grid squares to make lines or disrupt your opponent’s lines – but you can only do this so many times, so you have to use your turns wisely.
It all seems a bit complicated at first, but it only takes a couple of games for the gameplay to ‘click’, and in no time you’ll be thinking two moves ahead, laying traps, and crushing your opponent with a treacherous steal in the final turn.
Grab a slice of happiness
Happy Portions is a fun, colourful, amazingly innovative puzzler that deserves to consign tic-tac-toe to the dustin of history. And its eight year old (!) creators promise to make it even more fun with extra bonus features if enough people download this version.
So what are you waiting for? Grab Happy Portions for free right now on the App Store [get] and Google Play [get].
This article is sponsored.
