Tic-tac-toe, known to British people as noughts and crosses, is a famously boring game that is nonetheless often played by anybody with a sweet wrapper, a pencil and five minutes to burn while waiting for any form of public transport. It’s boring because it’s a “solved game” whose outcomes can be safely predicted regardless of where you place your first nought or cross, allowing the “perfect” player to at least draw their opponent. It gets played regardless because a lot of people don’t know it’s a solved game – specifically, young children you may wish to humiliate using your superior grown-up brain, because when you were a child somebody did the same to you.
How many twisted adults were born from the experience of being bullied via the medium of tic-tac-toe? We’d be better off without this game. But look! Here comes Tic Tactic to shake things up with a touch of Balatro.
In this roguelike deckbuilder, each round of noughts and crosses is an individual skirmish in a vengeful duck’s quest against some murderous chickens. I don’t have time to explain that premise, because my opponent has just played a specialised kind of cross that sets neighbouring noughts on fire.
I will retaliate with a nought that causes earthquakes, reshuffling the pieces, then play a nought that restore my health. Yep, Tic Tactic is one of those games that takes a centuries-old proven concept and asks “but what if it was an RPG”. So far, it’s getting away with it. I’ve just been playing the Itch.io browser demo, and I’m enjoying the transformation of a game I loathe into one I can imagine playing on the tube.
It feels like the trick isn’t that the noughts and crosses have a bunch of wacky D&D modifiers. The secret sauce is that when you score a line of three, dealing damage to the other player, it doesn’t reset the board. The scoring tiles vanish, leaving spare or opposing tiles in place. So in addition to setting up those trios, you’ve got to worry about follow-through, plus the usual roguelike business of saving your most powerful pieces for the opportune moment. Just some very cursory impressions, anyway.
Tic Tactic is on Itch.io right now, with a Steam page to follow in the next week or so. I’m writing it up in advance of the Steam page’s launch because I’m going to have my hands full next week, but I’ll sling the link into the Maw when it arrives. There’s no release date yet.