Noughts & Crosses Game — Handmade Wood & Aluminium

Tic-tac-toe in wood and aluminium — a board that stays out on the table rather than being drawn on a napkin.

Details

• Handmade wood board with aluminium pieces
• Hand-applied finish
• Complete set, ready to play
• Suits a coffee table, games room, study, bar or waiting area

The game

Tic-tac-toe is solved. With perfect play by both sides it is always a draw, and there are only 255,168 possible games — few enough that it was one of the first games a computer ever played. In 1952 a program called OXO ran on the EDSAC at Cambridge and beat human opponents, making it arguably the first video game.

The reason children abandon it around age eight is that the strategy is learnable in an afternoon. The reason it still works as an object on a table is that everyone already knows the rules.

Roman versions of a three-in-a-row game have been found scratched into pavements across the empire.