I built a multiplayer Tic-Tac-Toe backend in Go without an AI coding agent. The board rules were the easy part. The more demanding work was deciding how the server should create games, track turns, keep two players in sync, and manage persistent connections. Building it myself gave me room to make and revise those decisions; that is my experience, not evidence that manual coding is better for everyone.
Why build a small game?
Tic-Tac-Toe has a compact domain: a board, two players, alternating turns, and a finite set of outcomes. That simplicity made it a useful setting for me to focus on backend responsibilities rather than a large collection of game rules.
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I did not use an AI coding agent to implement the project. I wanted to make the design choices, write and debug the code, and understand why each part existed. As I put it, “The game is simple. The engineering isn’t.”
What the backend is responsible for
The backend I describe supports creating and joining games, starting a match, accepting and validating moves, checking for a winner, tracking turns and state, maintaining WebSocket connections, and broadcasting updates. Example routes include POST /games to create a game, GET /games/{gameId} to retrieve one, routes for joining, starting, and making moves, and GET /games/{gameId}/ws for the WebSocket connection.
#1 Best Overall
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Those routes are examples of the API described in the project, not a claim that a particular public deployment or complete API specification is available.
Who should be responsible for each part?
I split responsibilities so that HTTP translation, game rules, and message delivery would not all live in one place. The boundaries I describe are a design choice for this project, not an independently reviewed implementation.
Rank #2
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| Component | Responsibility | Why separate it? |
|---|---|---|
| HTTP handler | Receives requests, calls the relevant application or game operation, and returns HTTP responses. | It handles the protocol without becoming the home for game rules. As I put it, “A handler shouldn’t know how your business works. It should know how to talk to your business logic.” |
GameManager |
Manages the collection of games and operations such as creating or finding a game. | Collection and lookup responsibilities stay distinct from the rules for a single match. |
Game and board logic |
Represent game state and apply rules, including whether a move is valid, whose turn it is, and whether play has ended. | Domain decisions remain in the game layer rather than being scattered across HTTP routes or socket code. |
ConnectionManager |
Registers WebSocket connections and broadcasts game updates to them. | Delivering messages is separate from deciding what the game state means. |
How WebSockets keep players updated
A WebSocket connection begins with an HTTP request. If the server accepts it, the request is upgraded to a persistent, two-way connection. The server can then send an update when game state changes rather than asking clients to poll repeatedly for the latest state.
That does not remove the need to decide what clients receive. A generic payload can be simple to send, but a common, typed message envelope can make message kinds and their data explicit. The project discusses both approaches; it does not report a benchmark or establish one as universally preferable.
Rank #3
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What happens when there are 100 games?
The number of games makes ownership and lifecycle decisions more important, but it does not by itself answer how the implementation behaves under load. In this project, the game manager is the natural place to organize game collection operations, while each game’s state and each player’s connection have different lifecycles.
The implementation described keeps game state in memory, so a server restart loses it. That choice can be adequate for a learning project, but it is not durable storage. PostgreSQL or Redis are possible future persistence choices; the right fit depends on requirements such as what must survive restarts and how the application needs to retrieve or share state.
Rank #4
- Classic gameplay
- Great for game night
- Oversized pieces are easy for little hands to grasp
- A perfect addition to your game collection
- For 2 players, ages 6 and up
What multiplayer exposed beyond the board rules
Real-time play adds coordination problems that a local board does not have. The server has to validate moves against current state, notify the right clients after a change, and cope with connections that disappear or return.
Recommended Free Tools
- Concurrency: simultaneous requests could race while changing shared game state. The project identifies this as unresolved; it does not describe a tested concurrency-control strategy.
- Connection lifecycle: registration, removal, and handling dead WebSocket connections need more robust treatment.
- Reconnection: reconnecting a player to an existing game is not implemented.
- Identity and authorization: player identity and authorization are basic, so the account does not establish a production-grade access-control model.
What I learned by making the decisions myself
Working through the project made API design, domain modeling, separation of concerns, state management, WebSockets, event broadcasting, error handling, concurrency, Go, debugging, and architecture tangible for me. That is a personal reflection, not a measured learning result or a comparison with AI-assisted development. An agent might generate code quickly, but speed alone would not answer the design questions I wanted to work through.
Best Value
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- Portable Board Game: designed board games provide a convenient place to store pieces, making them safe and in one place. The box is designed with a lid that slides easily and in the right size for easy portability.
- Great Gift: good for various occasions, such as a Christmas gift, birthday gift, classroom teaching and so on.
What I would test and improve next
Before extending the project, I would make the game rules explicit in tests and address the unfinished state and connection concerns. The cases I identify for unit tests are:
- Horizontal, vertical, and diagonal wins.
- A draw.
- An invalid move and a move made out of turn.
- A move attempted after the game has ended.
Beyond those rule tests, the next engineering work is to decide what state must persist, make updates safe when requests overlap, and handle WebSocket registration, removal, and disconnection more deliberately. Those are open tasks in the project, not features I claim to have completed.
Quick Recap
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