Tic-Tac-Dough - Gameplay

Gameplay

The goal of the game was to complete a line of three X or O markers on a standard tic-tac-toe board (with the reigning champion always mounting X's). Each of the nine spaces on the gameboard featured a category. Contestants alternated choosing a category and answering a general interest or trivia question in that category. If they were correct, they would get an X or O in that square; otherwise, it would remain unoccupied. The center square, being of the most strategic importance, involved a two-part question, with the contestant given ten seconds to think of the two answers needed to win the square. After each question, the categories would shuffle into different positions (in the 1950s series and early in the 1978 revival, the categories would shuffle after both contestants had taken a turn). In the 1990 series, contestants hit their buzzers to stop the shuffling themselves. If at any point in a game it became impossible for either contestant to win with a line (a so-called "cat game"), the match was declared a draw and a new game would start. The process would continue until the deadlock was broken, however long it took to do so. This meant that a match could take multiple episodes to complete, which happened quite often. Tic-Tac-Dough used a rollover format to enable this to take place smoothly; this meant that a match could start at any point in an episode, continue until time was called, and then resume play on the next episode where the game left off with the same categories in play.

The gameboard on the original 1950s series used rolling drums (each containing the same nine categories) to display subject categories, with light displays beneath them to display the X's and O's. When Tic-Tac-Dough was revived in 1978 the game board was made up of nine monitors, which displayed the categories and X's and O's. The 1990 series used a completely computer generated setup.

On the original 1950s Tic-Tac-Dough, a winning player could play until either he/she was defeated or elected to stop on their own. The second option was a Barry & Enright staple that had been used on Twenty One, and it was important for a contestant to consider as if he/she chose to play another game and lost, the new champion's initial winnings would be deducted from the outgoing champion's final total. On the 1978 CBS daytime series, players played until either being defeated or reaching the network's $25,000 total winnings limit. There was no such restriction on the syndicated series that debuted in the fall of 1978 at any point during its run. The 1990 series did impose a win limit of fifteen but it was never reached, as the longest contestant winning streak stopped at twelve victories early in the show's run.