This is not a post about reviewing TiqTaqToe. That would be a little weird, coming from its creator! Rather, this post serves as a bit of a history of the game, and also as a way to put it into context among other quantum games (and other quantum tictactoe versions).
The beginnings
In the summer of 2018, when I was a postdoc at Caltech, I had a discussion with my host there (Gil Refael!) on research topics. While most of that discussion was technical, the end of it somehow turned into gamification (or puzzlification?) of quantum problems. Gil introduced me to Spiros Michalakis, the outreach manager of the institute, who in turn invited me to join working on “Quantum Chess”.
Christopher Cantwell created Quantum Chess in Unity, with which I had zero experience. So I decided to first make a simple game myself, to get used to Unity and C# and how things worked. That prototype was… quantum tetris! I quickly noticed that the main difficulties with quantum games are in visualization and in finding a mechanic that makes use of entanglement.