Flowers, sparkles, and everything nice -- a game inspired by tic-tac-toe

When falling down the pit of boredom with limited options ahead of you, grab a pen, paper, and a friend or foe to play a subtle retake of tic-tac-toe with cuter pieces and the option to literally blow your opponent away -- Flowers & Sparkles!!

RULES:

• played on a 5 x 5 board
• horizontal or vertical wins require 5 in a row with a mixture of normal x or o pieces and special x (sparkles) and o pieces (flowers). A diagonal win is not possible with only normal pieces.
• special pieces: a ＊for the x-player and a flower for the o-player. Special pieces allow diagonal wins of either 3, 4, or 5 in a row. 2/3 of a 3 in a row win must be special, 2/4 of a 4 in a row, and 3/5 of a 5 in a row.
• The catch: special pieces have a cost. Each special piece takes 2 turns to make. A player can choose to place a special piece on an empty spot on the board, or upgrade an existing normal piece to a special one.
• Blow outs: if a player has 2 or more adjacent special pieces (horizontally, diagonally, or vertically), then during their turn the player can choose to clear out all the pieces in the respective row, column or diagonal. Each player may choose to blow out only once, ever, during a round of the game.

Reflection:

So far in testing, the game works and is reasonably fun as long as both players are properly involved in the strategy of the game. Though I feel it's satisfactory and still has the nice properties of tic-tac-toe (it's portable and convenient), it doesn't offer much impact or really that much creativity to the game world. The basis of this game is hard to get excited about, and there's not really that much of a "I want to play!" kind of feeling. Given more time, I would've liked to make the changes required to offer players that kind of draw, maybe adding a narrative, or have some cooler unexpected ways to play the game? 

I think the game is playable for all ages, and it did have the side effect of shutting my sisters up while they were thinking about their next moves. It ended up being pretty effective against the problems of draws or obvious wins, but not effective enough I think. I do think it does a good job of offering players different strategies to win, and I like the social, kind of social element that leaves your opponent guessing as to where you'll place a special piece. Since the game can be won without special pieces, however, I do think I should offer more of an incentive to use special pieces, since that's where the real fun of my game lies. In testing, some games the players would just opt to use very few special pieces and from there on the game would devolve into an even more boring version of tic-tac-toe.