Tic Tac Toe

How to play Tic Tac Toe

1. Two players take turns marking squares on a 3×3 grid — one draws X, the other O. X always goes first.
2. The first player to line up three of their marks — across, down, or diagonally — wins the round.
3. If all nine squares fill with no line, it's a draw: the "cat's game".
4. Marks swap every round, so the first-move advantage changes hands. The score keeps tally as long as you keep playing.
5. Classic tip: take a corner, not the center edge — corners open two diagonals. If your opponent builds two threats at once (a fork), it's already too late to block.

A little background

Tic tac toe — noughts and crosses in Britain, Xs and Os elsewhere — may be the oldest game people still play. Romans scratched a version called terni lapilli onto stone two thousand years ago, and every generation since has rediscovered it on the back of a school notebook. Between two players who know what they're doing, every game ends in a draw — which is exactly why beating someone feels so good: it means they blinked.

This version keeps the pencil-and-paper feel — hand-drawn marks, paper board, the scratch of graphite — and adds what the notebook never had: a computer opponent with three levels (Easy is winnable by a six-year-old; Hard plays perfect minimax and never loses), pass-and-play on one phone, and a live duel where two devices share the same board in realtime. Free, no ads, no account — and it works offline once loaded.