Ranked by the users of the website Board Game Geek as the 27,121st best game out of 27,121 games, Tic-Tac-Toe - an alternative, and undoubtedly stupider name, for the game Noughts and Crosses. This ranking comes from an average score calculated from the hundreds of people who have felt it necessary to review a game you played on the inside covers of exercise books at school instead of writing about how different animals in Orwells Animal Farm represented different people you’d never heard of.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. The user Ahj00ma has provided the game with a score of 7 out of 10 - well above its rock-bottom 2.7 average, pointing out that Noughts and Crosses is, “accessible in a ll languages” and “extremely portable.”
Predictable for a covert agent of guerrilla warfare, the ninja user ninjabellybutt is having none of it, giving the game 2 out of 10, dismissing its “weak theme and terrible art,”
If he wasn’t a dangerous mercenary from feudal Japan, I would argue with ninjabellybutt. I’d point out that the “art” of noughts and crosses is entirely within the hands of the participants. You could draw little pictures of badgers instead of ‘O’s and little caricatures of Lisa Stansfield instead of X’s.
The charge of the game Noughts and Crosses having a “weak theme” is somewhat more difficult to rail against even if you shoe-horn Stansfield into it. The word “theme” is defined as, “The main idea or message that is woven throughout a work, often about important topics like human nature, life, or society.” I guess you could say Noughts and Crosses represents commercialism, the inherent violence of man, the importance of family, societal structures, spirituality. Let’s just say that and not think about it any more.
But it is hard to argue with MikeJonez’s comment that, “there is so much better out there.” That there are things, not just in board games, but in practically every facet of existence that are superior to Noughts and Crosses. But similarly, I would argue, that there is so much worse out there, an easy example being those large rotating doors you use to get into John Lewis.
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