Will it work?

or are there other micro board based solutions?

No, you'll want something with an x86-based CPU, not ARM.

The Intel NUCs could be a possible solution (but quite a lot more expensive).

So a pi 3 is not able to run x86 programmes?

Not in any usable form.

It can't run x86 natively as it's an ARM CPU.

Running it through an emulator (like QEMU) would be too slow.

Way back when PPC Macs existed, there was a fork of WINE that integrated QEMU for CPU emulation as well, but that's been more or less abandoned/dead for 10 years as well.