Two players, one phone: tap a square, the opener swaps every round, and a draw is one tap away from vanish mode
Classic rules: a 3x3 grid, two players alternating into empty squares, the opener playing X and the other O. There are eight winning lines - three rows, three columns, two diagonals - and the first player to fill one wins. Occupied squares (including your own pieces) simply do not respond to a tap and never count as a move. Nine pieces with no line is a draw. There is no clock and no timeout loss: thinking is never punished here.
Vanish mode, this page's answer to the endless draw: each player keeps at most three pieces on the board, so placing a fourth removes that player's oldest one. The order is fixed - remove, then place, then judge - which means the piece that disappears on this very move takes no part in this move's three-in-a-row check. A line that looks complete because of it is not a win, and that is the single rule newcomers miscount. The doomed piece is marked with a dashed breathing ring before you commit. Because the grid can never fill, this mode has no full-board draw; only a 60-move deadlock is called a stalemate.
Scoring and match format: first to 1, 2 or 3 (3 by default). A decided round scores one point for the winner; a draw scores nothing for either side and only bumps the draw counter, leaving the match progress untouched. Who opens depends purely on the round number - player 1 opens rounds 1, 3, 5 and player 2 opens rounds 2, 4, 6 - and the opener always plays X. Reaching the target ends the match with a summary card: final score, draws, and how many slips each player made.
Take-backs are deliberately different in the two modes. In two-player mode a narrow window appears for 2.5 seconds after a move, labelled “ask your opponent first”, and then it is gone: it exists for a mis-tap, not for a change of heart, and a change of heart is a conversation, not a button. Against the computer there is a permanent Undo that rewinds one full exchange and can be pressed all the way back to an empty board; the round still scores normally and the result card notes how many take-backs you used. In vanish mode an undo also puts the piece that just disappeared back where it was, at the front of the queue.
Strategy: the centre square sits on 4 winning lines, a corner on 3 and an edge on only 2, so open in the centre, then a corner, and treat an edge as a last resort. Games are decided by forks - one move that creates two winning squares at once, because your opponent can only block one. The usual way to build one is to take the centre, take a corner to force a reply, then land on the square that joins two lines at the same time. As the second player, the standard defence is simple: answer a centre with a corner, answer a corner with the centre, and block the instant your opponent has two on a line. Vanish mode adds one more question before every move: which of my pieces is this about to push off the board, and was it the one holding my opponent's line shut?
Last updated: 2026-08-29 · Saved on this device only
