Tiled Wooden Travel Version Tic-Tac-Toe Box. Wooden box with tile overlay containing a set of pieces to play Tic-Tac-Toe for easy transportation and set up, providing both a carrying space and a ready-made three-by-three grid on a flat surface. 

Size: 5 1/4 x 5 1/4 x 2 1/4 in. 

#4378 . 

Tic-tac-toe, also called “noughts and crosses” in England or “Xs and Os” in Canada and Ireland, is a game often played with pencil and paper for two players who take turns marking the spaces in a three-by-three grid with an X or an O. The player who succeeds in placing three of their marks in a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal row is the winner. It is a solved game, with a forced draw assuming best play from both players, making tic-tac-toe one of the ultimate examples of a futile game in game theory. Since the optimal strategy becomes apparent quickly it is most commonly a game played by children. However, the deceptively simple game has been used as a pedagogical and even military tool for centuries, originally teaching the concepts of good sportsmanship and loss mitigation, with current applications engaged in the branch of artificial intelligence that deals with the searching of game trees. Games played on three-in-a-row boards can be traced back to ancient Egypt, where such game boards have been found on roofing tiles dating from around 1300 BC. An early variation of tic-tac-toe was played in the Roman Empire, around the 1st Century BC. It was called terni lapilli (meaning three pebbles at a time), and instead of having any number of pieces, each player had only three; thus, they had to move them around to empty spaces to keep playing. The game’s grid markings have been found chalked all over Rome. Another closely related ancient game is Picaria, a game of the Puebloans, and the first print reference to one of the common modern names appeared in 1858, in an issue of Notes and Queries referring to “children’s noughts and crosses.” The name “Tic-tac-toe” may derive from “tick-tack,” the name of an old version of backgammon first described in 1558. The US renaming of “noughts and crosses” to “tic-tac-toe” occurred in the 20th Century. In 1952 a British computer scientist named Sandy Douglas developed OXO for the EDSAC computer at the University of Cambridge, making it one of the first known video games. In 1975 tic-tac-toe was used by MIT students to demonstrate the computational power of Tinkertoy elements. The Tinkertoy computer, made out of (almost) only Tinkertoys, is able to play tic-tac-toe perfectly, and is currently on display at the Computer History Museum.