Introducing Games: Tic-Tac-Toe Inside the Chat

We just shipped the first of our chat games on Chatarooni: tic-tac-toe, played right inside a conversation, with moves that sync live for both people. You challenge whoever you're matched with, the board appears for both of you, and when the game ends either person can hit rematch. That is the whole feature. It is small. I think it might be one of my favorite things we've built, and I want to explain why a tic-tac-toe board earns its place in a chat app.

Update, July 2026: the roster has grown since this post. Four-in-a-row came next, and then the big one: a full game of chess inside the chat. Everything below about why a game belongs in a conversation applies double to chess.

The problem games actually solve

Random text chat has a specific failure mode, and anyone who's spent time on it knows it cold. You get past hello, you trade the where-are-you-from openers, and then there's a beat where neither person has the next thing to say. The conversation isn't bad. It just stalls. On Omegle that beat was usually fatal: somebody skipped, and a person you might have genuinely liked vanished for good.

Most of the time that lull isn't about chemistry. It's about having nothing to do together. Typing back and forth is a thin medium. A shared activity gives two strangers a reason to stay in the same place for another few minutes, and those extra few minutes are where the actual conversation tends to happen.

So that's the bet. A game in a chat isn't there to be a great game. It's there to carry a conversation across the dead spot. If you want the longer argument for why I'm so fixated on giving people things to do, I made it here: things to do with online friends besides just texting.

Why tic-tac-toe, and not chess

When you say "add a game," the first instinct is to reach for something impressive. Chess. Some real-time card thing. A little multiplayer arcade. I went the other way on purpose, and the word I kept coming back to was simple: tic-tac-toe is the smallest possible thing that still works.

Tic-tac-toe is over in a minute. Nobody needs to learn the rules, because everybody learned them at age six. It doesn't demand concentration, which means you can keep typing while you play. That last part matters more than it sounds: a game that pulls your full attention away from the chat would defeat the entire point. The board is a backdrop for the conversation, not a replacement for it.

A heavier game raises the stakes in a way that can be wrong for strangers. Losing a chess match to someone you met thirty seconds ago is a weird amount of investment, which is why chess arrived later and stayed something you opt into rather than the first thing you meet. Losing at tic-tac-toe is a shrug and a "okay, rematch." The low stakes are the feature. The game is meant to be background music for a conversation, light enough that you forget you're playing it and just keep talking, which is the only thing I actually care about here.

How it works

During any chat, either person can start a tic-tac-toe game. The board shows up inline for both of you and the moves sync live, so when your partner taps a square you see it land in real time. No turn-passing screen, no "waiting for opponent" spinner that takes you out of the moment. It feels like you're both looking at the same piece of paper.

When the game finishes, win, lose, or the inevitable draw between two competent adults, there's a rematch button. Most people press it. You'd be surprised how often "best of three" turns into the thing you're still doing twenty minutes later, the actual conversation now running comfortably alongside it.

It works the same whether you're chatting with a random stranger or with someone on your friends list. If you sent a friend request mid-chat and it got accepted, you keep that direct thread, and the game is right there in it the next time you both show up.

Let me be honest: it was the only one

I'm not going to oversell this. On the day I wrote this there was exactly one game, and it was tic-tac-toe. A single board and a rematch button. I'd rather you know that going in than feel let down.

The reason I shipped one game instead of waiting to launch five is the same reason I shipped Chatarooni in the first place: I'd rather put a small real thing in front of people and watch how they use it than polish a big plan in private for six months. That is exactly how the next two arrived. Four-in-a-row and then chess got built because of what people actually reached for tic-tac-toe to avoid, which I could only learn by having it live. If you have opinions on what should come next, that's genuinely the kind of email I like getting at support@chatarooni.com.

The same instinct is why we built synced YouTube watching before we built anything fancier. Drop a link, the video plays in sync, play and pause mirror for both people. A game and a shared video are two answers to the same question, which is: now that you've met this person, what do you actually do with the next half hour?

This fits the whole point of Chatarooni

The thread running through everything here is that meeting a stranger shouldn't be a dead end. Omegle gave you the meeting and then stranded you with nothing but a text box and a skip button. We kept the part that worked, the one-tap doorway to a random person, and spent our time on the part it never had: reasons to stick around. Friends so a good stranger doesn't evaporate. A synced video. And now games.

If you want the longer version of that philosophy, I wrote it up in why we built Chatarooni. The short version is that a game inside a chat is a tiny thing that quietly changes how a conversation goes, and that's the kind of tiny thing I want to keep adding.

Go beat a stranger at tic-tac-toe

No account, no download. Hit start, get matched, and once you're a few messages in, challenge them to a game. Worst case you draw forever. Best case you make a friend.