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Ultimate Tic Tac Toe looks simple until you realise every move controls where your opponent plays next. Here are the rules, a worked example, and the first things to learn.

Going second in tic tac toe loses 40.5% of the time. Going first loses only 9.9%. Here is what 26,776 real online games tell us about the structural advantage of moving first.

Snake started as a two-player arcade game in 1976, spent two decades in obscurity, and then a Finnish engineer accidentally created one of the most played games in human history.

Rock paper scissors is over 2,000 years old. It started as a Chinese drinking game with frogs and centipedes, became Japanese infrastructure, and eventually spread to the rest of the world via Allied soldiers and a 1927 French children's magazine.

Every beginner's guide says the same three things about Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe. None of them explain why strong players sometimes deliberately avoid winning a board they could win right now.