Did you know that tic-tac-toe was inspired by an ancient Roman game?
Imagine this: It’s a weekend and you have wrapped up all your pending school assignments. You had plans to go out on a playdate, but that got cancelled last minute. Thankfully, you still have your sibling by your side and you decide to play something fun. He grabs hold of a paper and two pens and randomly draws two vertical lines and crosses them with two horizontal lines. Guess what this leads to? A three-by-three grid with nine squares. It doesn’t take more than a minute for you to realise what he is up to. He wants to play the game we all love and know as tic-tac-toe. He starts by marking X within a square and you start strategizing where to put your O. Game on!
But wait, before you get engrossed in the game, come join us today to trace the one-of-a-kind birth story of tic-tac-toe.
Tic-tac-toe: The descendant of Terni Lapilli
Although globally popular as tic-tac-toe (thanks to Americanisation), how you identify this fun and exciting game is really dependent on where you live. For instance, people in England know it as noughts and crosses (noughts being an alternative term for ‘zero’), while if you land up in Ireland or Canada, you will hear people calling it Xs and Os.
Now that we have settled as to what we should call it and where, let’s quickly move on to how the game originated. While some believe that tic-tac-toe was derived from an ancient Egyptian three-in-a-row board game dating back to 1300 BC, the most popular birth story of tic-tac-toe is associated with the prehistoric (first century BC) Roman game called Terni Lapilli meaning ‘three pebbles at a time’. Well, people aren’t really wrong for believing so. Here’s why.
Terni Lapilli, as it turns out, was played on an identical three-by-three grid. The only difference is, unlike tic-tac-to, it wasn’t just played on paper, but all kinds of surfaces around ancient Rome, starting from stone to wood. Not only that, Terni Lapilli was not played with markings, but rather movable pieces, like in chess. Most historians believe that they were most probably Xs and Os that were placed alternatively, but not more than three times. Interestingly, similar games such as three men’s morris (played on a simple grid with three pieces in a row to win) and Picaria may have also contributed to the origin of tic-tac-toe.
From ticktack to tic-tac-toe
How and at what point in history did Terni Lapilli exactly encourage the making of tic-tac-toe remains unknown. However, experts do know that the name tic-tac-toe emerged somewhere in the late 19th century when a game called ‘ticktack’ was popularised all across Europe. It was played by blindly throwing a pencil at a slate marked with numbers. Guess how players kept track of the scores? By simply tallying the numbers hit with the pencil. While this game is extinct today, its name survived and was expanded into tic-tac-toe. It is now believed that the name was derived around 20th century from the sound that generated when the pencil hit the slate.
Playing tic-tac-toe
As for the modern game we play today, we all know that it’s played on a nine square grid having three horizontal rows and three vertical columns. Two players are involved; one starts with marking X with the opponent alternating it with O. The goal is simple, to achieve three marks either horizontally, vertically or diagonally within a row.
Fun Fact
Interestingly, tic-tac-toe is popular among mathematicians for it is the best way to teach the simple mathematical principle of probability. For instance, you will be surprised to know that there are as many as 138 unique winning combinations; or there are 362800 unique ways to place Xs and Os into the grids. Nonetheless, it’s fairly an easy game to play, that is both fun and captivating, making it a hit among youngsters and adults alike.