Play Tic Tac Toe game with animations and graphics - play in 3x3 or 5x5 or 7x7 grids!

Tic Tac Toe - how to play

Tic Tac Toe (also known as noughts and crosses or Xs and Os) is a paper-and-pencil game for two players, X and O, who take turns marking the spaces in a 3×3 grid. The player who succeeds in placing three of their marks in a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal row wins the game.

About

Because of the simplicity of Tic Tac Toe, it is often used as a pedagogical tool for teaching the concepts of good sportsmanship and the branch of artificial intelligence that deals with the searching of game trees. It is straightforward to write a computer program to play Tic Tac Toe perfectly or to enumerate the 765 essentially different positions (the state space complexity) or the 26,830 possible games up to rotations and reflections (the game tree complexity) on this space.

Tic Tac Toe game can be generalized to an m,n,k-game in which two players alternate placing stones of their own color on an m×n board, with the goal of getting k of their own color in a row. Tic Tac Toe is the (3,3,3)-game. Harary's generalized Tic Tac Toe is an even broader generalization of Tic Tac Toe. It can also be generalized as a nd game. Tic Tac Toe is the game where n equals 3 and d equals 2. If played properly, the game will end in a draw, making Tic Tac Toe a futile game

Tic Tac Toe Winning Strategy

A player can play a perfect game of Tic Tac Toe (to win or at least, draw) if each time it is his turn to play, he chooses the first available move from the following list, as used in Newell and Simon's 1972 Tic Tac Toe program.
- Win: If the player has two in a row, they can place a third to get three in a row.
- Block: If the opponent has two in a row, the player must play the third themselves to block the opponent.
- Fork: Create an opportunity where the player has two threats to win (two non-blocked lines of 2).
- Blocking an opponent's fork: If there is only one possible fork for the opponent, the player should block it. Otherwise, the player should block any forks in any way that simultaneously allows them to create two in a row. Otherwise, the player should create a two in a row to force the opponent into defending, as long as it doesn't result in them creating a fork. For example, if "X" has two opposite corners and "O" has the center, "O" must not play a corner in order to win. (Playing a corner in this scenario creates a fork for "X" to win.)
- Center: A player marks the center. (If it is the first move of the game, playing on a corner gives the second player more opportunities to make a mistake and may therefore be the better choice; however, it makes no difference between perfect players.)
- Opposite corner: If the opponent is in the corner, the player plays the opposite corner.
- Empty corner: The player plays in a corner square.
- Empty side: The player plays in a middle square on any of the 4 sides.

The first player, who shall be designated "X", has 3 possible positions to mark during the first turn. Superficially, it might seem that there are 9 possible positions, corresponding to the 9 squares in the grid. However, by rotating the board, we will find that in the first turn, every corner mark is strategically equivalent to every other corner mark. The same is true of every edge (side middle) mark. For strategy purposes, there are therefore only three possible first marks: corner, edge, or center. Player X can win or force a draw from any of these starting marks; however, playing the corner gives the opponent the smallest choice of squares which must be played to avoid losing. This might suggest that the corner is the best opening move for X, however another study shows that if the players are not perfect, an opening move in the center is best for X.
The second player, who shall be designated "O", must respond to X's opening mark in such a way as to avoid the forced win. Player O must always respond to a corner opening with a center mark, and to a center opening with a corner mark. An edge opening must be answered either with a center mark, a corner mark next to the X, or an edge mark opposite the X. Any other responses will allow X to force the win. Once the opening is completed, O's task is to follow the above list of priorities in order to force the draw, or else to gain a win if X makes a weak play. More detailedly, to guarantee a draw, O should adopt the following strategies:

- If X plays corner opening move, O should take center, and then an edge, forcing X to block in the next move. This will stop any forks from happening. When both X and O are perfect players and X chooses to start by marking a corner, O takes the center, and X takes the corner opposite the original. In that case, O is free to choose any edge as its second move. However, if X is not a perfect player and has played a corner and then an edge, O should not play the opposite edge as its second move, because then X is not forced to block in the next move and can fork.
- If X plays edge opening move, O should take center or one of the corners adjacent to X, and then follow the above list of priorities, mainly paying attention to block forks.
- If X plays center opening move, O should take corner, and then follow the above list of priorities, mainly paying attention to block forks.
- When X plays corner first, and O is not a perfect player, the following may happen: