Chess Tic-tac-toe

Easy to pick up, harder to master — playable solo against a bot at four difficulty levels, or online with a friend over a shared room code.

The trigger

Tic-tac-toe is the first game most of us learn and the first one we stop thinking about. Two people who've played before draw every time. The board is solved in your head before your hand moves.

I play chess casually — enough to know what makes it interesting is the opposite: the pieces move, so the position is never settled. My friend Pran knows I play, and one day he sent me an Instagram reel about a chess-tic-tac-toe hybrid. I watched it and said, half-jokingly: let me vibe code that. Little did I know I'd actually do it.

Why I felt this was something worth building

You'd want to keep what makes tic-tac-toe good — a small board, rules you can explain in thirty seconds, a game that ends in a few minutes. You wouldn't want a full chess engine grafted on. You'd just want enough movement that a line one step from winning can fall apart, and enough that repositioning a piece can be worth more than grabbing a new square.

So, what is Chess Tic-tac-toe?

A small strategy game on a 4×4 board. Each player gets four pieces — a pawn, a knight, a bishop, and a rook. Get all four in a row and you win. The catch is your pieces move, under real chess rules, which means the board you're staring at now is never the board you'll be playing on next turn.

You can play locally with someone on the same screen, go against a bot at four difficulty levels, or share a room code and play online with a friend.

How it works

The first six moves are a placement phase — each player puts down three pieces, one at a time. After that, on any turn you can place your fourth piece, move something already on the board, capture an opponent's piece, or respawn a piece that was taken.

Pawns move away from your own side and bounce back when they hit the far edge. Knights jump in their L-shape, bishops slide diagonally, rooks sweep in straight lines — all on a tight 4×4 grid, so things get crowded fast. Four in a row across, down, or diagonally wins immediately. Either player can offer a draw.

The bot at the top two settings will make you think. Getting it to look more than a move ahead on a board this small turned out to be more interesting than I expected. Online play runs through a WebSocket server that handles rooms, reconnects, and rejoins — so you share a code, talk someone through the rules in under a minute, and go.

Where it stands

I said "let me vibe code that" and meant it as a one-afternoon thing. It now has four bot difficulty levels and a WebSocket multiplayer server. Pran, this is on you.