People play Tic Tac Toe all over the world. People may call it Naughts and Crosses, Ecke, Mecke, Stecke, Tripp, Trapp, Trull and many other names but the rules remain the same. Players take turns marking Xs and Os on a 3 by 3 grid until one player wins by getting three Xs or Os in a row or until all nine squares are filled and the game is a draw.

Most people are surprised to learn that today's Tic Tac Toe is such a new game. Chess, checkers, and backgammon are all much older, but Tic Tac Toe is just the most recent member of a family of three in a row games so old that they were played by the workers who built the pyramids.

You can find more than a dozen row games from around the world in the book Tic Tac Toe by Claudia Zaslavsky along with illustrations and interesting facts. Here are three of the best: