Apple / games / LINE-3
REVIEW
Line-3 turns a centuries-old board game into a ray-traced pocket puzzle.
Nicolas Schulz's tiny indie reskins Picaria — the Native American ancestor of Tic-Tac-Toe — as a 15-round score chase rendered with realtime ray tracing on iOS.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 10, 2026 · 3 MIN READ
Most three-in-a-row games on the App Store are Tic-Tac-Toe with a skin. Line-3 is the rare one that actually changes the rules. Nicolas Schulz built it around Picaria, a Pueblo board game where each player only has three stones — but once they’re placed, you keep moving them. That single tweak walks the genre out of the solved-game graveyard.
The other unusual thing about it is the renderer. Schulz wrote a realtime ray tracer for the board, then randomised the lighting so every round catches the stones from a different angle. It’s a one-developer game charging a dollar to show off a technique normally reserved for film pipelines. The result is the kind of small, specific, slightly stubborn project the App Store used to be full of and now mostly isn’t.
Tic-Tac-Toe with a move phase turns out to be a meaningfully better game, and the lighting is doing real work.
FEATURES
The core loop is Picaria, a three-in-a-row game from Pueblo cultures that plays on a board of intersecting lines rather than a grid. You and the AI each have three stones. Phase one is the Drop Phase — tap to place your stones on highlighted pins. Phase two is the Move Phase — slide a stone to a free pin to try to form a line. Because pieces stay in play and move, the dead-draw outcome that makes adult Tic-Tac-Toe pointless mostly disappears.
A full session is 15 rounds against AI that scales across three difficulty levels, each rendered in its own color theme. Scoring is round-based, which gives the app its arcade frame: chase a high score across the run, don't just win one match.
The visual hook is the lighting. Schulz built the renderer around realtime ray tracing — the description bills Line-3 as the first mobile game to use the technique end-to-end — with randomly generated lighting setups so the board catches different highlights each round. It's a $0.99 premium app with no ads and no in-app purchases.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
Picaria is the right rules-set to dress up this way. The Move Phase rewards positional thinking in a way Tic-Tac-Toe never can, and three rounds in you notice you're already playing a real game rather than rehearsing a solved one. The 15-round score format makes losing a single match feel like a beat in a longer story instead of a hard reset.
The economic structure is honest. One dollar, no ads, no IAP, no consent dialogs — the kind of pricing model that has nearly disappeared from the App Store games chart. Pair that with what is genuinely one of the more striking-looking abstract board games on iOS and the asking price reads as fair.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
Line-3 looks abandoned. The App Store listing shows a last update in April 2023, with no Game Center leaderboards to anchor the score-chase, no online play, and no asynchronous matches against friends. For a high-score game in 2026, that's the missing layer.
The audience is also tiny — the App Store shows roughly two dozen ratings across the lifetime of the app, which means there is no live community to ladder against and no recent press to suggest a v2 is coming. The Picaria rules are taught inside the app but never contextualised; a few sentences on the game's Pueblo origins would do more for the experience than another lighting preset.
CONCLUSION
Line-3 is worth a dollar if you like quiet abstract board games and want to see what a serious indie does with mobile ray tracing. Don't expect updates, leaderboards, or human opponents. If you bounce off Tic-Tac-Toe-shaped games, the Move Phase will surprise you; if you wanted Chess.com for Picaria, this isn't that, and nothing else is either.