Tic Tac Doh! is one of over a hundred games that are playable with Looney Lab’s Icehouse Pieces. And, it’s one of a couple of abstract strategy games playable with just one "stash" of those Pieces.
Players: 2
Playing Time: 5-15 minutes
Complexity: 2 (of 10)
The Components
Icehouse Pieces come in stashes. Each stash is composed of a square plastic tube which contains within 15 pyramids--5 each in small, medium, and large sizes. The small pyramid just fits inside the medium pyramid and the medium pyramid just fits inside the large pyramid.
Icehouse stashes come in 9 different colors: red, blue, green, yellow, purple, orange, black, white, and clear. However, Tic Tac Doh is a game that needs only one of those stashes, and thus only one color. I selected red, as can be seen in nearby photos.
The pieces are all composed of hard plastic. The plastic is well molded, and almost entirely clear of "flash". The inside tops of each pyramid tend to have a slight problem with air bubbles, but otherwise the molding is very clean. Most of the colors, including the red that I used, are translucent, which gives the pieces a wonderful ethereal feel to them. Each pyramid is also marked with pips between "*" and "***", to denote its size. This is a very nice device that helps to make the size of a pyramid very obvious, even if you don't have other ones nearby for size comparison.
Icehouse is really a gaming system rather than a game. The idea is that there is sufficient complexity among 15 pieces in three different sizes, multiplied by up to 9 different colors (although most games use no more than 4) to create lots of different games. And, as already noted, over a hundred have been created on the Internet.
Technically all you need to play Tic Tac Doh is that afore-described stash of Icehouse Pieces. The rules can be found on the Internet. However, Looney Labs has also recently printed a free product called Ice 7. This packet of 10 cards lists rules for 7 different games ... including Tic Tac Doh.
The rulecard does an impressive job of winnowing the rules down to what'll fit on the front and back of a card (with most of the back taken up by a simple example)--and fortunately the rules for this game are simple enough that they survived the reduction. Having these rules simply available on a card, without need to resort to the Internet, was a great boon.
Overall, I find the Icehouse Pieces classy and impressive, worthy of a Style rating of "4" out of "5" ... and I expect I might upgrade that for future reviews when I try a game with more than one color pyramid being used.
The Game Play
As already noted, the complete rules for Tic Tac Doh can be found on the Internet. However, the following is a short summary of the same.
First, Tic Tac Doh depends upon a few concepts which are common to many Icehouse games:
Trees: A Tree is a stack of Icehouse Pieces of increasing value, e.g. a small on a medium on a large.
Nests: A Nest is a stack of Icehouse Pieces of decreasing value, e.g. a large on a medium on a small.
Imaginary [3x3] Grid: An imaginary grid is a grid that is not set until the pieces define it. For example, when you place the first piece on the board, that could be the center of the grid or an edge, depending on future plays. The only rule is that you can't play a piece that couldn't fall within the imaginary grid, as defined by the extant pieces. The grid for this game was 3x3.
Tic Tac Doh starts out with all of the pieces to the side. In turn players each take one of the following three actions:
- Fill a Square. Play any piece within an unused square of the imaginary 3x3 grid.
- Build a Tree. Add to a tree. (E.g., play a small on a medium, a medium on a large, or a small on a medium that's already on a large.)
- Build a Nest. Add to a nest. (E.g., play a medium on a small, a large on a medium, or a large on a medium that's already on a small.)
Beyond that:
- You can't build both a tree and a nest in the same square.
- You are restricted by the 15 pieces available to play.
- You must play a piece each turn.
The game ends when one player plays a piece that causes 3 matching pieces to be in a row--a nest only counts as its visible piece, while a tree counts as all its pieces.
Game Variants
The only real problems my game partner and I had while playtesting Tic Tac Doh is that it's sometimes hard to tell when pieces are nested within each other--and that's of considerable relevance because you can't build both a nest and a tree in the same space. My fellow playtester came up with the idea that you could use different colored pieces for each pyramid size, and that this would help visibility. I commented that it'd also make it easier to see pending victories.
It turns out this variant is suggested in the online version of the rules too.
Relationships to Other Games
First, and obviously, Tic Tac Doh bears a clear resemblence to Tic Tac Toe. They're both arbitrary decision games played on a three by three grid. However, Tic Tac Doh has an increased strategic complexity because of the increased number of possible plays each turn. (Parenthetically, Tic Tac Doh also has some fairly faint resemblance to a game I recently reviewed called Chekov, mainly because they're both ultimately Tic Tac Toe derivatives; Tic Tac Doh goes the way of increased cognition and strategy, while Chekov went the way of increased randomness.)
Second, it's worth repeating that Tic Tac Doh is part of a large family of games that can all be played with Icehouse Pieces. I'm aware of two other fairly decent games that can be played with just one stash: Rotationary is a simple, but fun, solitaire game, while Ice Sickle is a more Checkers-like game which I think may have even higher strategic resonance than Tic Tac Doh. With increased numbers of stashes, exponentially more games can be played.
Finally, if you're a fan of Looney Lab games in general, it's worth commenting that Looney's games seem to come out in two widely different categories. On the one hand you have his funny card games, like Fluxx, Nanofictionary, Aquarius, and Chrononauts. On the other hand you have his abstract strategy games, such as Q-Turn, Cosmic Coasters and ... Icehouse.
The Game Design
Tic Tac Doh is, largely, a two-person puzzle game. From my experiences with the game, it seems to break down into two broad categories of gameplay:
Two casual players will play in an almost entirely reactive/tactical manner, only making moves in order to prevent the other player from winning on his turn. The end winner tends to be largely randomly determined, as the player who no longer has a loss-avoidance possibility.
Two very serious players will play in a very cognitive/strategic manner, each trying to use lookahead to force the other player to make a move that will result in their own victory.
The game seems to work fairly well at both levels, as there is plenty of strategy available for those serious players, while the turn-by-turn tactics can be sufficiently fun for those casual players that they won't be too concerned about their affect on the overall victory. The only place the game falls down is for what I call a high-level casual player; these are players who want to be able to plan ahead, but don't want to iterate through all of the possibility branches every turn, as is required for a very cognitive game like Chess (or Tic Tac Doh). They'll find the casual play too random and the serious play too thoughtful.
Overall, the play of Tic Tac Doh is what I'd categorize as "deceptively simple". There are many, many possibilities within the game, and victory often comes down to forcing a player to use one of few remaining pieces rather than setting a trap with the board alone.
Unless you fall into the narrow category I described, I think Tic Tac Doh is well worth playing. I give it an average Substance rating of "3" out of "5", with the caveat that overall gameplay is considerably more expansive than that because there are at least a couple good games that can be played with just one stash of Icehouse pieces, let alone with multiples.
Conclusion
Icehouse Pieces are an interesting product, because they don't form just a game, but rather a game-design toolkit. As the first game I've played with said toolkit, Tic Tac Doh was a lot of fun. It gets clear kudos as a travel game because of its compact packaging, but also wins out as a casual game, because of its quick play and as a serious game, because of its cognitive puzzle solving.
Review Summary