Pokémon Tic Tac Toe is the grid game: three row rules, three column rules, and nine squares that each demand a character who satisfies both. A square where "Kanto" meets "Gym Leader" wants somebody who is both, and naming them fills it.

Every board is generated to be solvable with nine different characters, so no square is a dead end — but each character can only be used once on the board. The trap is not finding an answer, it is spending the only answer to a hard square on an easy one.

Tap an empty square to see its two rules and a count of how many characters satisfy both. Type a name — two letters is enough to start searching — and pick from the list. A correct answer fills the square with that character's portrait; a wrong one shakes red and leaves the square open, with no penalty beyond the time.

Solo is the daily board: everyone gets the same nine squares, there is no attempt limit, and the clock is what the leaderboard ranks. There is also a Versus mode for two people on one device, with an optional thirty-second turn timer, where a wrong answer passes the turn and three squares in a line wins.

When a game is over, every square becomes clickable and shows the full list of characters who would have satisfied it, marking the ones you played and the ones you had already used elsewhere. It is the fastest way to learn where a board beat you.

Survey before you fill. Tap each square to see how many valid characters it has and start with the tightest ones — the square with three possible answers has to be fed before the square with twenty-five, because the easy square will still have options left afterwards and the tight one will not.

Think about what an answer costs elsewhere. A character who satisfies four different squares is a valuable piece; spending them on the square you could have filled three other ways is how a solvable board turns into an unsolvable one.

Use the rule families. The rules come from the same pool as Poké Bingo — regions, classes, organizations, types, debut series, power brackets, legendary ownership, gender — and no axis repeats a family, so a row and a column asking about the same kind of thing never happens. Reading the family first tells you what sort of character you are hunting.