Maj Zirkelbach and Aleksander Sadikov

Abstract
Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe is an interesting and popular variant of Tic-Tac-Toe that lacks available resources for improving gameplay skills. In this paper, we present a semi-automatic system for generating puzzles as a part of a larger tutorial application aimed at teaching Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe. The puzzles are designed to enhance players’ tactical and strategic understanding by presenting game scenarios where they must identify correct continuations.
To ensure the quality of generated puzzles we tested the application with a group of volunteers. The results have shown that the number of solved puzzles positively impacted users’ ability
to reach higher strength levels but had less of an effect on lower levels.