"Tic Tac Troll" or "U Mad?"

"Tic Tac Troll" or "U Mad?"

Nah, let's call it "Tic Tac Draw Your Cards"

This version of Tic Tac Toe has a nice little competitive spin that does not require much skill but keeps them coming back for more. A game that is determined by the chance of a flip of the coin and the luck of the draw does not seem to scream competition, but the need to win remains, which creates a different type of competition.

The game consists of the traditional X and O on a 3x3 game board. Each player is provided with a set of 11 cards ranked from 0 to 10 points that are shuffled before the beginning of each round to ensure a random draw. Flipping a coin determines whether X or O goes first. This way it is randomly determined whether X will end up with 5 cards on the board and O with 4 or the other way around (assuming the round ends as a tie). Now the player must hope that they drew high value cards. This is the chance portion of the game. I did take into consideration that the round itself may be won in the traditional manner of matching three, thus an additional 5 points is rewarded to the player who is so lucky as to have won the round (in turn the player who was so unfortunate as to have not caught on is punished. This did happen to me at least three times). Players may play as many rounds as desired, so long as at least three are played to ensure a better total overall score.

So how does this seem fair when a winner has a chance to lose? What I had hoped to accomplish with this game was to incite an excitement that came from the interactions of people who share the same uncertainty of chance but still feel as though they can win. I saw this happen when I played with Cuong. During one game set, he managed to win two rounds by matching three and gained ten additional points, but still lost the overall game by 1 point. How did this happen? He drew very low cards while I drew very high cards: one round was a whopping 11 to 36 unassisted. What came from this was the drive to try again until he could win (which he did in the third game). Afterwards, we reflected upon this concept of the luck of the draw by comparing it to poker, which we attempted to play with the game's card decks.