About TicTacToeFun

The story behind the site

Tic-tac-toe is the first game most of us ever play. Three rows, three columns, two symbols. The whole thing fits on a napkin. And yet — somewhere between the schoolyard and adulthood, most of us stop thinking about it. We outgrow it.

That's a shame. Tic-tac-toe is actually fascinating. It's a "solved" game (mathematicians know exactly how every position should be played), it has a 4,000-year history, and it has cousins — Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe, Misère, Gomoku, 3D variants — that are genuinely deep strategic games. It's also the first game programmers learn to teach a computer, because it sits at the perfect intersection of "simple enough to fully solve" and "complex enough to be interesting."

TicTacToeFun exists to share all of that.

What we do

This site has two halves:

Who's behind it

TicTacToeFun is a project by — A software developer from Kolkata who's been obsessed with game theory since stumbling onto Conway's On Numbers and Games in college. The idea for the site came from a simple observation: most tic-tac-toe sites on the web are flooded with ads, stale, or poorly designed. There was room for something genuinely good — fast, beautiful, deep, and free.

I built the entire site from scratch in plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. No frameworks, no trackers beyond the basics, no popups demanding your email. Just games and articles, designed to load fast and look like someone actually cared about how they look.

Our mission

Three things matter to us:

  1. Make tic-tac-toe fun again. Beyond "X goes in the corner, O blocks the center." There's a whole world of variants and strategies that almost no one ever learns about.
  2. Make the AI feel fair. The "Easy" AI isn't dumb — it just doesn't always pick the best move. You should be able to win sometimes. "Hard" should make you think. "Impossible" should make you respect the math.
  3. Respect your time and attention. No autoplay videos. No "subscribe to our newsletter" popups thirty seconds in. No dark patterns. Just games and articles, with unobtrusive ads to keep the lights on.

How we think about content

Every article on the blog is original, written by humans (sometimes with AI assistance for research and outlining, always edited and fact-checked by a person). We cite sources for historical and mathematical claims. We don't write listicle filler. If you read something here, we want you to come away knowing something interesting.

If we ever get something wrong — a historical detail, a strategy claim, a mathematical statement — please tell us at [YOUR EMAIL]. We'll correct it and credit you if you'd like.

How we make money (and why ads)

The site is free for you. Running it isn't free for us — there's hosting, a domain, time spent writing articles and improving games. We support the site through unobtrusive ads via Google AdSense, plus possibly affiliate links to relevant books or board game retailers in the future (clearly marked when used).

We try to keep ads from getting in the way. Game pages don't have ads inside the playing area. Articles have at most one or two ads per page. If you ever feel an ad is intrusive or misleading, please let us know and we'll look at it.

What's next

The site is a long-term project, not a quick experiment. Planned additions over the coming months:

  • More variants: Wild Tic-Tac-Toe, Notakto, Order & Chaos, 3D tic-tac-toe
  • Two-player online matches (with a share-able room link)
  • Daily puzzles: "you're X, find the winning move"
  • Coding tutorials: build tic-tac-toe in Python, JavaScript, and other languages
  • Translations of the most popular articles into Hindi, Spanish, and other languages

Get in touch

Questions, suggestions, bug reports, hello messages — all welcome. Email [admin@tictactoefun.com] or use our contact page.

Thanks for visiting. Now go play a few rounds — and try the "Impossible" mode. It's harder than it looks.