How to Play Tic Tac Toe Online With a Friend

Tic Tac Toe is the game everybody already knows, which is exactly why it is the easiest thing on this site to start with. There is nothing to learn, nothing to install and no account to make. One person opens the game, hits create, and sends the link that appears to whoever they want to play against.

The version here is genuinely live rather than a hot-seat game shared on one screen. Both players sit in the same room over a WebSocket connection, so a move made in one browser appears in the other immediately. That makes it a reasonable thirty-second thing to do on a video call while you are waiting for the last person to join, and it works the same on a phone as on a laptop.

How to play Tic Tac Toe

1. Open the game and create a room. A link containing the room id is generated for you.
2. Send that link to the person you want to play. They open it and are seated automatically as O; the player who created the room is X.
3. X always moves first. Players alternate, each claiming one empty square of the 3x3 grid per turn.
4. The first player to line up three of their own marks in a row - horizontally, vertically or diagonally - wins immediately.
5. If all nine squares fill with no line of three, the game is a draw. Between evenly matched players this is the normal outcome.

Strategy and tips

• Take the centre if you move first. It is part of four of the eight possible winning lines, more than any other square, and it is the single strongest opening.
• If your opponent takes the centre, answer with a corner rather than an edge. Edges belong to only two winning lines and give you the fewest ways to threaten back.
• Look for forks: a move that creates two separate lines of two at once cannot be blocked, because your opponent can only answer one of them.
• Before you build your own threat, check whether your opponent already has two in a row. Blocking is not optional - a missed block loses the game on the spot.
• Once both players know the fork patterns, every game is a draw. That is not a flaw in the game, it is the point at which Tic Tac Toe becomes a warm-up rather than a contest, and a good moment to move on to something with more room in it.

What makes Tic Tac Toe different

Most online Tic Tac Toe pages put you against a bot or ask you to sign in to a lobby. This one does neither. There is no matchmaking queue, no username, no email: the room is the link, and the link is the whole invitation.

It is also the simplest demonstration of the same link-sharing model every other multiplayer game here uses, so if you are trying the site out with a colleague it is the fastest way to check that the connection works before starting something longer.

Frequently asked questions

More to read

• Free browser games to play with your team, no signup: Games that start in one click, work on a call, and never ask anybody to make an account.