About
A small site that takes a small game seriously.
Tic tac toe usually gets shipped as a throwaway. It is actually a family of properly different games, some of them solved, some of them still open. This site treats them that way, and it costs nothing to play.
- Games, one engine
- 12
- Games, one engine
- Accounts required
- 0
- Accounts required
- Runs in your browser
- 100%
- Runs in your browser
One engine behind twelve games
Every game here runs on the same rules engine. A game is a short description of itself: how big the board is, how long a line has to be, whether finishing one wins or loses, and what you are allowed to put down. The board, the computer opponent and the rules pages all read from that one description, which is why all 12 of them behave consistently.
How the computer plays
First it checks the obvious things: can it win right now, and is it about to lose. Then it looks for forks, meaning single moves that create two threats at once. Underneath that sits a search that looks ahead as far as the difficulty allows. On the 3x3 boards, Master reaches the end of the game, which is why it never loses.
Why it stays quick
Big boards narrow the search to squares near stones that are already down, and every search runs under a hard limit on how much it can look at. The whole thing happens on a background thread, so even a deep Gomoku reply never freezes the board you are looking at.
What is stored, and where
Your difficulty, your side, your sound preference and your win record live in your browser and never leave your device. There is no account because there is nothing to attach one to. Clearing your browser data resets everything.
Why it is free
Ads pay for it. That is the whole business model. There is no premium tier, no unlockable game, no limit on how many rounds you can play, and no point in the funnel where we ask for your email. If a game is on this site, you can play it.
Where the games come from
Tic tac toe goes back to ancient Rome, where a three in a row game called terni lapilli was played on the streets. The variants here are mostly modern: Gomoku from East Asia, Notakto analysed in 2013, Quantum invented in 2006 by a physicist teaching superposition. None of the rules are ours. We just built somewhere good to play them.
Built with
Astro and Tailwind CSS, published as plain static HTML. No framework runtime is sent to your browser, just the game engine, the board controller and the styles. That is why pages open fast on a phone with two bars of signal.
Questions, bug reports and suggestions all go to[email protected].