Showing posts with label Tic Tac Toe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tic Tac Toe. Show all posts

Monday, October 11, 2021

Well, Boxes is better than Tic Tac Toe

 I’ve recently been playing Boxes with our seven-year-old on the Nintendo Switch via Clubhouse Games. That has to be a particularly ridiculous use of technology since Boxes is a game whose fame comes in great part from the fact that you just need a paper and pencil to play it.

You know it. Draw a grid of dots and take turns drawing lines in between the dots. Complete a box and you initial it to claim it as your own and get another turn. Most points wins.

Seriously, playing it on a video game console beyond overkill. Not quite as extreme as using a car as a way of honking a horn as opposed to transportation but it is silly. In fact, since you can’t change the size of the grid, it’s actually inferior to pencil and paper. Still, it’s a way to get a seven-year-old to actually play.

And, while I have played the odd game of Boxes over the years, I don’t know what I really think of it. It’s cute and very convenient to play but strategy really seems to come down to trying to not let your opponent finish a box and setting up a cascade of moves for when your opponent makes a mistake. The game feels like waiting for someone to make a mistake. And with decent play, one mistake will decide the game.

Yes, Boxes is heaps better than Tic Tac Toe, which I have also spent time playing with our son. And if they lead to playing better abstracts, so much the better. But both games feel more like fidgeting than strategy games for me.

And perhaps Boxes is a step to playing the better games on Clubhouse Games.

Tuesday, June 20, 2017

Pocket Ops is clever but is it clever enough?

IMy latest print-and-play project was making the demo copy of the Grand Gamers Guild's Pocket Ops for the precise goal of actually playing it to see if I wanted to back the Kickstarter for the full print-and-play files. Which is kind of the point of demo PnP but I usually don't finish them in time :P

Stripped down to the basics, Pocket Ops is a Tic Tac Toe variation. Before you make your move, your opponent guesses where you will place your stone and, if they get it right, blocks your move. The demo comes with one special piece, that assassin, that can take the place of an already placed stone. The full game will come with other special pieces.

It was a five minute build. Two decks of nine cards for guessing your opponent's moves, a tiny board and I used tokens from my PnP tool box. 

On the one hand, Pocket Ops is much better than Tic Tac Toe. Super simple modifications that are very easy to explain, Pocket Ops definitely achieves its goal of taking a game everyone knows and giving it a designer spin.

On the other hand, we still weren't that engaged by it. A lot of the time, we had blocks of null moves because we were able to call each other's bluff. And the three by three board ultimately felt cramped and limited, part of what made the bluffing less interesting.

I'm torn, really. I think that Pocket Ops is a super clever idea and a take on Tic Tac Toe that makes the game more interesting without being fiddle. But, at the same time, we weren't that excited by it.

Keep in mind, short and tiny games have become a hobby of mine. I have played a lot of them over the last few years. And Pocket Ops just doesn't make the list of ones I would automatically reach for or be jonesing to play.

So we've decided that Pocket Ops isn't for us. At the same time, it is a clever enough design that I do intend to keep on following the company.