oxo3d - 3d noughts and crosses / tic-tac-toe
Oxo 3D is a 3 dimensional (4x4x4) noughts-and-crosses / tic-tac-toe game for pico-8. This is a game with considerably more strategy than the traditional 3x3 version.
Quick start
You're O and you have to get 4 in a row. The board is a cube viewed in slices. Imagine the 4 slices piled on top of each other.
Use the arrow keys to move the highlight and press Z to place a piece.
Use X to view the cube in different orientations.
Use Enter to view the menu to change level.
Watch out for tricky diagonal lines!
Good luck!
How to play 3D Noughts-and-Crosses
Each group of 4x4 positions represents one plane on the cube.
On each layer there are 10 possible winning lines, 4 horizontal, 4 vertical and two diagonal.
However lines may run from layer to layer also.
There are 76 lines in total possible, these are 4x4 = north-south lines, 16 east-west lines, 16 vertical lines, 2x4x3 = 24 diagonal lines from one edge to another, and 4 diagonal lines from corner to corner.
Levels
There are 3 carefully graduated levels which you change with the cartridge menu (Enter).
- Easy
- Medium
- Hard
The levels get increasingly hard. Easy and Medium use the same simple heuristic player, but Easy makes random mistakes. Hard uses a two level lookahead player - watch out is is very sneaky.
History
- Written in ZX81 BASIC (1983)
- Converted to QL BASIC(1985)
- Converted to BBC Basic (1985)
- Converted to Psion 3a OPL (1994)
- Converted to C (1996)
- Converted to Perl (2000)
- Converted to Python (2004)
- Converted to LUA and pico-8 (2019)
I used to play this game with my father when I was a boy. We always used to play on squared paper while sitting round the kitchen table. When I was old enough (and the home computer had been invented) this inspired me to write a computer player for the game.
The very first version of this game was written in 1983 on a Sinclair ZX81 in BASIC. It used to take 60 seconds to think of a move, and it used to beat the author nearly all of the time.
This pico-8 version is a pretty faithful port of the original ZX81 game though I think the original program only had the equivalent of Medium difficulty.
I wrote this as a first step towards getting my son interested in pico-8 programming - I thought I'd better learn how first!
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