About This Game

THREE IN A ROW IS NOT A WIN

It is a discharge. Line up three of your marks and they detonate: the marks burn, the hostile process takes the damage. A line of four hits nearly twice as hard. A line of five, three times over.

Every turn the process writes its own marks back onto the grid. If three of those ever line up, they detonate into you.

BUILD A MACHINE, NOT A SCORE

Clear a sector, take a module. ECHO leaves one mark standing after every blast. INFECTION flips the enemy marks next to it. CHAIN REACTOR doubles the bonus on every step of a cascade. Two or three together stop being upgrades and start being an engine.

Thirty modules across six schools, eight slots to hold them. When the rack is full, something has to come out.

THE TERMINAL

Fragments are data, and data rots. A quarter of everything you carry out of the shop decays on the way, and every purchase marks the market up. Spend fast or lose it: buy cards, cut your deck thinner, force a card into its stronger form, or widen the rack.

EIGHT SECTORS, THEN THE DEEP

Eleven hostile processes, six of them drawn fresh every run. One heals itself while its marks hold the grid. One rewrites your marks into its own. One makes every discharge of yours cost you blood.

Beat the core and you can stop there — or go deeper, into procedural layers that never stop climbing.

DUEL A FRIEND — ONLINE OR ON ONE SCREEN

Invite a friend from Steam and fight on the same grid: your marks against theirs, one card per turn, first to two sector wins takes the match. Between sectors you each draft and shop, so every player brings their own build.

No friend online? Sit down together at one computer — your hand hides while you pass the turn.

WHAT IS IN IT

• Online 1v1 duels through Steam, plus local two-player on one screen
  
• 30 modules, 24 cards, 7 cores, 11 processes, 6 difficulty protocols
  
• Boards of 4×4, 5×5 and 6×6 — the geometry is part of the build
  
• A daily challenge: the same deal for everyone, one score to beat
  
• 25 achievements, an endless mode, and runs that save themselves
  
• Generative chiptune that thickens the deeper you go

You have played tic-tac-toe since you were six. You never played it like this.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

We conducted game testing with AI bots and fine-tuned the balance.

TIC.EXE does not use AI while you play. The procedurally generated boards, runs and the chiptune soundtrack are all produced by hand-written algorithms, and no content is generated at runtime.