Tic-tac-toe where pieces vanish, so every game ends in a win. Each player keeps only three pieces on the board: place a fourth and your oldest disappears. It's fast, competitive and impossible to stall.
Play: https://tictactoeultimate.alidirect.dev · How to play
- Ranked Arena: lines shatter and deal damage to a health bar (125 HP), with combos, a red-alert ×2 finale, knockouts and overtime. A Glicko-2 ladder runs from Bronze to Master.
- Casual (sudden-death clock), Old school (classic, no vanishing), Unlimited, and Daily (one move a day, up to 10 games).
- Pass & Play on one device, fully offline, including Arena.
- Bots fill the queue when nobody's around: perfect play from a solved tablebase, with mistakes tuned so they win about 49% against each player. They show a BOT tag.
- Accounts: play as a guest instantly. Email sign-in carries your guest games, streak and quests over. Usernames, friends, chat, challenge links and live spectating.
- Retention: daily streaks with freezes, daily quests, history and move-by-move replays, and perfect-play analysis that marks blunders.
- Polish: Bert the ghost mascot (15 moods) plus X and O sidekicks, thrown emotes, impact frames, confetti, haptics, and dark and light themes.
| Part | Tech |
|---|---|
| Clients | Blazor WebAssembly (web) and .NET MAUI Blazor Hybrid (iOS, Android, Mac). One shared Razor UI library. |
| Game server | ASP.NET Core + SignalR. Authoritative matches, clocks with lag compensation, matchmaking, ratings. |
| Engine | TicTacToeUltimate.Engine: pure, deterministic rules, clocks, the Arena layer and a solved tablebase. |
| Bots | Go service (bots/): a rules port checked against the shared vectors, a tablebase brain, and one goroutine per game. |
| Data & auth | Supabase (Postgres + email auth). In-memory stores for local dev. |
| Hosting | Web on a Cloudflare Worker (static assets + API proxy). Server and bots in Docker on a Google Compute Engine e2-micro. |
The rules are shared as JSON test vectors in spec/, so the C# and Go engines provably agree.
TicTacToeUltimate.Engine/ rules, clocks, arena, tablebase (no dependencies)
TicTacToeUltimate.Contracts/ DTOs shared by server and clients
TicTacToeUltimate.Server/ game server (SignalR hub, matchmaking, ratings, persistence, bot gateway)
TicTacToeUltimate.Client/ client state stores and services (no UI)
TicTacToeUltimate.Shared/ Razor UI: pages, components, CSS
TicTacToeUltimate.Web(.Client) web host and WebAssembly app
TicTacToeUltimate/ .NET MAUI app (iOS, Android, MacCatalyst)
bots/ Go bot service
supabase/ migrations and auth config
deploy/ Cloudflare Worker, VM compose stack, static SEO pages
spec/ tools/ tests/ rule vectors, solvers and simulators, tests
Requirements: .NET 10 SDK; Go 1.24 for the bots; the MAUI workloads for mobile.
scripts/dev.sh # server http://localhost:5091, web http://localhost:5028
cd bots && go run ./cmd/botd # optional: bots join after ~12 s in a queue- Local dev needs no accounts or keys. It uses a dev sign-in with fixture players and in-memory storage. To play two players on one machine, open two tabs with
?as=ali_xoand?as=kestrel_99. - iOS simulator:
dotnet build TicTacToeUltimate/TicTacToeUltimate.csproj -f net10.0-ios -t:Run -p:RuntimeIdentifier=iossimulator-arm64 - Android emulator:
dotnet build TicTacToeUltimate/TicTacToeUltimate.csproj -f net10.0-android -t:Run
dotnet test TicTacToeUltimate.Web.slnf # engine, server, integration, client, UI
cd bots && go test ./... # Go rules port vs shared vectors, bot win-rateAGENTS.md: product decisions and their history.docs/ARCHITECTURE.md: implementation spec.docs/DEPLOY.md: how production is deployed.
Copyright (c) 2025-2026 Syed Ali (xuckless). All rights reserved. This is proprietary software; see LICENSE. No use, copying or distribution without written permission.