It’s pretty common to see developers take a well-worn gaming mechanic and expand upon it by building out a full dungeon crawler or RPG around it, and for some reason it’s taken us this long for somebody to take the ancient game of tic tac toe and make a dungeon crawler out of it. That’s exactly what Gamesare Studios is doing with their recently announced (and very cleverly named) Tic Tac Tower. The dungeon crawling, loot gathering, and enemy slaying will all look pretty standard, but they’re tied together very nicely with a tic tac toe-inspired movement system. Your character acts in a 3×3 gridded area of the dungeon, and you’ll need to claim a line of 3 boxes horizontally, vertically, or diagonally to continue moving through the dungeon. Action goes down within that grid while you’re trying to make your lines of 3, and combat with enemies is turn-based with them taking a turn after you do and slowly trying to claim the boxes around you. Also, you’ll only be able to move forward through the dungeon in the direction that you completed your third box in a line, so you’ll need to consider that before just making lines all willy nilly. Here’s a couple of animated .gifs showing Tic Tac Tower in action.

For the story of Tic Tac Tower Gamesare is going with an “X" theme, as the main protagonist is a Royal Xnight of the Xingdom and is named Sir Xandor. There will be at least 5 other Xnights you’ll be able to play as, and yes, all their names start with X: Sir Xavier, Sir Xerxes, Dame Xandra, Dame Xenia, and Xia. Tic Tac Tower sounds like a really neat concept for a game and I’m looking forward to seeing more about it. There’s no release date planned just yet other than “coming soon" but you can catch a couple more animated .gifs, some more game information, and details of the 6 playable Xnights in the thread in our forums and we’ll keep an eye on this one and bring you any news as it comes.