That's a good pointer, thanks. I've been thinking about building a simulator to help qualify Threes strategies.
In more advanced games, higher-number "next" cards are somewhat critical. When you do add them, I'd love to hear how you did it!
I believe the higher numbers work like this: every 21 turns, Threes generates a number from 0-20. After this number of turns elapses, if the highest number seen is 48 or greater, Threes skips drawing from the normal set of ones, twos, and threes, and instead generates a "special spawn". The special spawn is a number between 6 and <highest number seen> / 8 (I believe the distribution is uniform).
Source: Threes writes a preference plist that allows it to resume games if the app is killed in the background. The keys to look at are "PseudoSpawnSpecialIndex" and "PseudoSpawnSpecialList".
Funny, I've been doing the same thing. The hardest (well, most tedious) part has been figuring out the exact distributions used for the various random parameters.
