Little People

Counterpoint: it’s indispensable and nothing really fills the same niche.

Software was a mistake

Nothing wrong with that. My idea was to do a vector (or fixed-size array if you prefer) in one dimension. An example would be something like [0, 1, 2, 0, 1, 0, 2, 0, 2] (where O is 1, X is 2 and 0 represents an empty cell). The math to get the index is similar to this:

https://bfnightly.bracketproductions.com/chapter_3.html#building-a-simple-map

Might be overkill for a simple tic-tac-toe game, but if you want to rotate the board or whatever, you can just change the math you do to get the index. I’m not at all a math expert, but it seems like a reasonable approach.

A simple vector seems fine. Each item in the vector is an enum representing cell state. You can translate x y coordinates to an index pretty easily.

You seem fun

Nah. Don’t want loose produce rattling around my cart. I’m OK with reusable shopping bags, but let me keep the plastic sacks for produce TIA