Reinventing Tic-Tac-Toe

After playing games last week that heavily involved social interaction, I wanted to make my Tic-Tac-Toe game try and incorporate more players. It wasn't much of a success, so I decided to try and make a new game based off of TTT first. I started thinking of ways to combine TTT with another familiar game.

First I thought about the 2D Snake game and if there was a way to incorporate that for a grid with two players. I tested out some rules about drawing X's and O's on either side of the game and the goal was to "Eat" the other player's head or corner them off so they run out of spaces to fill. The game didn't turn out too well since it was too easy to be cornered off and it wasn't fun. I thought about changing the shape of the board, which led me to think about Chinese Checkers and how interesting it was for that game to be able incorporate more than 2 players.

I also thought about somehow filling in the boxes with letters and then in the end you had to maybe find words like Boggle. Since the alphabet has 26 letters, I was thinking of maybe rolling two dice and multiply or add their numbers so that the letters are randomized, but I never found an efficient way to randomly select letters.

Finally I settled on combining TTT with a card game. I played Speed where you have to get rid of all your cards the fastest, and Concentration where you have to match 4 cards in a row. Inspired by TTT, I placed cards down in a 3x3 grid, and then divided the deck in half. My brother and I played a few versions where we each took turns putting down a card on top of a pile. We tried allowing doubles and not allowing doubles, and how many cards need to be on top of a pile in order to claim it. After a few trials, I settled on what I thought was a good combination and the game was exciting and easy to play and a lot of it depends on luck which makes it have an anticipation factor.