I've been playing a really similar game called Tic Tactics, the only difference seems to be you can play in a won square until it's completely full then it becomes a free move. Not sure what overall difference that makes to tactics but it's interesting they made that small change. A big difference is taking a board doesn't give your opponent a free move, which improves late game a lot.

Actually it also starts the game with 9 moves each which makes things interesting, any collisions match and you can't take three in a row or the middle tile.

Thanks for the comment! I considered giving each team 10 seconds per turn but settled on 5 seconds since I didn't want the games to last too long. I wanted to make it such that people kept saying "oh I'll just play one more game." And - for what it's worth - I think that's the same place I first heard about the game.

I still feel 5 seconds is too short.

I actually decided to stop playing the game rather quickly, because the team is so desperate to move in 5 seconds that they make several terrible moves in a row, easily losing the game in a almost minimal amount of turns possible to lose.