Our first project began with an apparently simple prompt: take tic-tac-toe and make something more fun. “Easy,” I thought. “Tic-tac-toe is terrible, so nearly anything would make it more fun.” While this did prove to be true, crafting a game that truly adhered to the spirit of tic-tac-toe AND was fun proved to be a challenge, and an interesting exercise in piecing apart the core elements that give a game its spirit.
I started by brainstorming what I thought would make TTT more fun. Part of my frustration with this game has always been its inherent fatalism: barring a major slip-up or novice player, the first player always wins, and there’s no point to the other’s continued participation beyond fulfilling an obligation. I thought about ways to play with this fatedness in the game. Could the arrangement of Xs and Os change during gameplay for some reason, breaking the cycle? Could the conditions for winning be more complex and allow for different goals?
After playing with some iterations involving having users having different and possibly competing goals, I wasn’t feeling inspired, so I moved on to playing with moving around the game “pieces” after they’ve been set. During our first in-class playtest session, I introduced a game where the player had three options on each turn:
My playtesters immediately had a number of questions about the rotating-the-lines rule. Where was the rotation point? What happens to the spots on the grid that were previously two squares, but have now been combined into one? If a grid is now 4x2 squares, does that mean it only takes a row of two to win? I had some theories about these, but ultimately I asked what the players thought. They reasoned out the rules a bit (e.g. when two squares combine, all existing marks are removed), but generally seemed a little dissatisfied with how the rules seemed to miss with the winning conditions in ways that were as unpredicated and disempowering as the original game.
My biggest takeaway from this (beyond a clear indication that the game as it currently existed was dissatisfying) was that I liked the concept of the “board” itself being mutable, within the control of the players. I played with some suggestions for improving this dynamic (e.g. shifting whole rows of the board over one), but still felt a little dissatisfied with how this complicated the game and made physically playing it more unpleasant (all that erasing!)
I went back to the drawing board a bit and tried to list out the the things that (at least in theory) make TTT fun:
Killing time
All ages can play (simple, no skill required)
Thwarting the other player (blocking)
Distracting the other player so as to cause them to make a mistake
Trying to pay close enough attention yourself so as not to make a dumb mistake
Using or filling a blank space (e.g. fresh snow, a muddy windshield)
Physically drawing on your play surface (e.g. drawing on the muddy windshield)
I realized that all of my iterations were leading to games that were complicated to understand a play. I thought about the physicality of drawing Xs and Os, and as I played around, came up with a pretty simple concept that I quickly realized checked many of these boxes. It was simple and quick, could be played using any drawable surface as the gameboard, and incorporated the key mechanic of thwarting (blocking) the other player while trying to distract or trick them enough so that they forget to block you.
My rules were:
Tape down paper, one half facing each player.
Each player draws an O somewhere on their side of the paper.
The Os drawn must be as least as big around as the player’s pointer finger.
Each player holds a pen in one hand.
Use four fingers on the other hand (no thumb!) to guard your O.
Players must hold their guarding hand with their fingertips (not the sides of their fingers) touching the paper.
The goal is to be the first to draw an X in the other player’s O.
Enjoy!
In the spirit of childhood games, I created a fortune teller and wrote the rules under the corresponding numbers 1-8).
I was able to playtest the game somewhat with friends, and determined that the game was fun, energetic, and adaptable, as I’d hoped. Based on that, and some further feedback in class, I created my updated set of rules. This new set consolidated some rules, added a few new ones for clarity’s sake, and changed the language to be more material-agnostic (vs. specific stated for paper-and-pen play).
UPDATED RULES
Setup: Each player draws an O somewhere on their side of the playing surface. The Os drawn must be as least as big around as that player’s knuckle (exact knuckle to be negotiated by players).
Goal: Be the first to draw an X in the other player’s O, such that the part within the X is identifiable as an X on it’s own (without counting the outside-the-X part).
Gameplay:
Each player holds a pen in one hand (or uses one drawing finger), and uses four fingers on their other hand to guard their O. Players must hold their guarding hand with their fingertips (not the sides of their fingers) touching the playing surface.
Both players play guard and attacker at the same time; there are no turns.
The guarding hand must stay guarding - it can’t be used to interfere with the other player’s guarding hand.
The two lines making up the X do not need to be drawn at the same time.
