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 played on the inside covers of exercise books at school, when you should have been writing about World War II.
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. He points out how Noughts and Crosses is, “accessible in all 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 get into a heated discussion with ninjabellybutt. I’d point out that the “art” of Noughts and Crosses is entirely within the hands of the participants. Draw little pictures of badgers instead of O's BellyButt. It's your lack of imagination that's destroying what could be an aesthetic fireworks display.
The charge that the game Noughts and Crosses has a “weak theme” is somewhat more difficult to rail against, even if you shoe-horn badgers into it. A lazy Google search oft the word “theme” defines it 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. It's all these things and less.
It is, however, hard to argue with our final reviewer 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, like e those large rotating doors you use to get into John Lewis.
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