Tic A Tac Poker

Tic A Tac Poker is a fun casual game in it's own right, it is just scratching the surface of its potential for social gaming.

Tic A Tac Poker comes with three games that all build on the basic premise of combining poker with tic-tac-toe. You are dealt cards and need to lay them out in a 3x3 grid to form poker hands in one of 8 different lines (down, across, diagonal). The better the hand, the higher your score. The different variations of game are described by the developer as:

Tic A Tac Poker Make as many 3 card poker hands as you can. You get more points for the harder levels (less discards). Draw Poker Play 3 or 5 card draw poker head to head against the dealer. Winner of each hand gets to place a card on the game board. Win points by making as many poker hands as you can. Poker Challenge Play against the clock as you make the winning poker hand before time runs out.

The games themselves are fun to play and a nice diversion. Well designed and implemented with good graphics for the game style. The variations are a nice touch, both in the game differences themselves and the variations (like number of discards) each game has.

This game also integrates the beginning of a social community. Included are more than just the worldwide leaderboards. Also included are a basic forum and member information system. But it's just the tip of the iceberg on the potential of the social backend that they have developed. A quick look around their company site at treemo.com shows their backend is much more mature and feature packed than what is exposed in this game. That points to the potential of a much more interesting game. And the real interesting things start to happen when you start publishing multiple games on that same back-end.

Currently, the only downside to the social parts of the game are that they are a little slow. With them all being HTML based and accessed via an embedded browser, they tend to be slower than you'd want when not on a Wifi connection.

Overall, this game, even without the community aspects, is fun and well worth the $1.99 it's currently priced at. Throw in the community and the potential it has to make further improvements to this game and it's a real winner.