Three in a row, partner! Noughts and crosses played in a Wild West corral at sunset.
This is a complete mobile rebuild of the Tic-Tac-Toe game from Family Games, turned into a Wild West showdown. It’s planks and nails for X against a lasso rope for O, on a wooden board inside a roped-off corral, with swaying cacti, rolling tumbleweeds and mesas in the distance.
It keeps the original online multiplayer, talking to the same server and the same game, so people playing on their phones and people playing on the web end up in the same rooms. On top of that, it adds an outlaw AI, new modes, series play and a quick-draw timer.
The rules everyone already knows, with a whole world built around them.
Tumbleweed and Big Ranch modes, series, timers and a proper AI to beat, so regular players have plenty to dig into.
Play against the AI, pass one phone back and forth with a friend, or go online against people playing on the web.
These screenshots were captured straight from the game. Tap any of them to see it bigger.
Choose Classic 3×3, Tumbleweed or 5×5 Big Ranch, and play against the AI, a friend or an online posse.
Drag to aim and place your mark, with an optional quick-draw timer for each turn.
Use hints and undo, or keep an eye on the flickering mark that’s about to blow away.
Play best of 3 or best of 5, with lifetime stats and win streaks.
Greenhorn, Deputy and Sheriff difficulty levels, powered by alpha-beta search.
Classic, Tumbleweed (once you have 3 marks on the board, your oldest one blows away) and Big Ranch, a 5×5 board where you need four in a row.
Public and private rooms you can join with a code or an invite link, reactions shown in speech bubbles, rematches and automatic reconnection.
Portrait, square and landscape layouts that switch on the fly, all the way down to the cover screens on flip phones.
Music for the menu, the match and the quick-draw timer, with wood, rope, whip and coin sounds on every interaction.
Vibration, screen shake, puffs of dust, a shower of coins and a brass sheriff’s star trophy.
I made this game on my own, so I handled the design, the code, the art pipeline, the audio and the release.
On phones and in the standalone web version, it uses the Family Games protocol (REST rooms plus WebSocket with tickets). In the Showcase arcade, it plays on the game provider’s SignalR hub instead. Both feed into the same session object, so the match code doesn’t need to care which one it’s using.
RoomsHubSocket speaks SignalR’s JSON hub protocol over whichever WebSocket the build has, which is the browser’s in WebGL and System.Net.WebSockets everywhere else. It handles pings, backing off between retries and refreshing tokens.
The message format {type, roomId, seq, ts, payload} and the reconnect approach (starting at 500 ms and doubling up to 30 s, with 10 attempts) match the web client exactly, so web and phone players meet in the same rooms.
There are unit tests for the rules, the AI’s strength and the protocol parsing, PlayMode tests that take screenshots on 10 device profiles, and an online end-to-end test that plays the Unity game against a Node bot running without a screen.
generate_assets.py builds the board, the plank X, the lasso O, the fence, cacti, tumbleweeds, mesas, the sheriff’s star and the app icon in Blender, running without a window.
generate_ui_art.py renders the 3D signboard logo, the loading background, the piece medallions and the parchment texture used for the "wanted poster" style UI.
Music by Kevin MacLeod, sound effects from Kenney and OpenGameArt, and the Rye and Arvo fonts for the frontier-style lettering.
Credits. The Blender models and the icon are original. The music is by Kevin MacLeod (CC BY 4.0), the sound effects come from Kenney (CC0) and OpenGameArt creators (CC0 and CC BY), and the fonts are Rye and Arvo (OFL). Everything is credited on the in-game About screen.