Back in the 1980s, Games magazine ran an occasional feature called Pic-Tac-Toe. The premise was simple: nine images were arranged in a 3×3 grid. Each row, column, and diagonal of the grid had some theme in common. Through careful examination of the nine images, and sometimes a little lateral thinking, the solver was to identify the eight themes.

I think the reason Pic-Tac-Toe appeared so infrequently in Games is because it’s so hard to construct a good one. Consider: each image must combine at least two themes. Four of them must combine three themes. The center box has to work for four different themes! Putting these together is a delicate balancing act, and you’ll be lucky if even one of the clever themes you’ve thought of survives to the final grid.

While putting together a little image quiz of my own the other day, I noted how much easier this kind of construction has become in the age of Google Image Search and Photoshop. Your final theme needs a picture of Buffalo Bill Cody standing with Sitting Bull and you don’t have one handy? Now it’s a four-word Web search, not a four-hour library search, away. Or, if worst comes to worst, paste Buffalo Bill into a photo of Sitting Bull. Voila. I pondered resurrecting Pic-Tac-Toe here on the blog.

But then, the very next day, I found out that a reader named Todd was way ahead of me–he’d already finished a new Pic-Tac-Toe of his own. Not every theme was a gem and not every image a perfect fit, as he freely admitted, but I thought it was a nice effort.

After Todd challenged his solvers to compose their own grids, I took a few hours yesterday and gave it a shot. My attempt isn’t perfect either (a few themes are unremarkable, a few others are too similar, one image is a bit of a stretch, and movie stills are over-represented in the grid) but I think it’s nearly as good as some of the ones I remember from Games. Here it is below–you be the judge.

(Click on each image to see a slightly larger version.)