Let’s just suppose for a moment that you wanted to jazz up the tired old paper game Tic-Tac-Toe and bring into the age of video games. Let’s also suppose that it’s the 1980’s, so you don’t have a machine that’s really capable of doing a whole lot more than drawing vague shapes on the screen. What do you do? One option might be to move the whole games into the realm of three dimensions.
Drawing a a tic-tac-toe board so that it looks like it leans back in the distance is pretty trivial once you know a bit about perspectives, vanishing points, and… chiaroscuro shading. Now if this were just regular standard tic-tac-toe in three dimensions it would be pretty awesome, but the developers decided to take it two steps forward.
Step 1: Playing on a 3×3 grid is so last century. They updated the standard grid up to 4×4.
Step 2: Why stop at just one 4×4 grid? Let’s stack four of them on top of each other. Futuristic.
The game plays pretty much like regular old boring tic-tac-toe, except that you can win the game by getting four in a row across, down, or in a straight line through the grids (like a mark in the top-left corner of all four grids, or one in the top-left of the top grid, one in the second-to-left square in the top row on the second grid, etc.).
Does all of this sound fun? If so, you can use a pencil and paper to draw your own grids and recreate the experience. I think about five or so minutes will sufficiently recreate the level of fun you could ever get from this game.