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How to Play

Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe is relatively simple. You draw a Tic-Tac-Toe board, and draw another Tic-Tac-Toe board in each of the cells! And, just like in normal Tic-Tac-Toe, your goal is to get a 3-in-a-row.

Each player can only directly place into the smallest level cells, and earn the higher-level boards by winning them! Easy, right?

There is one catch! When you make a move, your opponent is sent to another board relatively to where you placed your piece.

In the example below, X played her first move in the bottom-left of a mini-board. O's next turn is then restricted to only being within the bottom-left board!

A tic-tac-toe board with tic-tac-toe boards in each cell. One of the mini-boards has an X in the bottom-left corner, and the entire bottom-left mini board is highlighted green.

This means that the most important aspect of your turn might not be where your piece goes, but where your opponent can go next!

One last thing for Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe: sending your opponent to a board that's already been claimed lets them go anywhere! This makes games end much faster than they start, as it gets harder and harder to avoid giving your opponent the opportunity to go anywhere they'd like!

Ultimate ULTIMATE Tic-Tac-Toe

If you want to play Ultimate Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe, there's one more thing to note! Winning a mini-board does exactly what happens in UTTT: your opponent is sent to that board. But, because there's more than 2 layers here, they get sent to the mini-board relative to the *cell* you played to get the win as well!

The gif below begins zoomed in on the top-centre board before X has her turn. When she wins the small right-centre board by placing her piece in the top-right cell, we zoom out to the rest of the board.

Her opponent must then play in the right-centre UTTT board, in the top-right TTT board. Play would then continue in the right-centre board until another board is won.

Endless Mode

If you're feeling particularly masochistic, you can start an endless game! There are no winners, only losers. The game begins with a classic 3x3 Tic-Tac-Toe game. When won, this board is shrunken down to one ninth of the next layer. This happens until the game is unplayably small, your browser crashes, or somebody quits.

Notice that the previous board shrinks to the last cell that was won. In the example below, X plays in the middle right cell. That board then becomes the middle right sub-board.