title: Is it possible to brute force this 5*5 Tic-Tac-Toe game?
body: <p>So I made up this game, but I'm not able to find a good strategy to always win.</p>
  <p>It's very similar to the <a href="https://www.wikihow.com/Play-Tic-Tac-Toe" rel="nofollow noreferrer">original 3×3 Tic-Tac-Toe</a>; but with changes.</p>
  <p>So you draw a 5×5 board. Then each player takes turns putting a cross and circle. We then count the &quot;scores&quot;.</p>
  <p><a href="https://i.imgur.com/D38fYXT.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer">This is a completed game</a> that I drew. The scores are made by counting every 3-in-a-row strike. So for example in the top row, cross player gets 1 point.</p>
  <p>You then do the counting horizontally, vertically, and both ways diagonally; for each row, column and diagonal.</p>
  <p>For a 4-in-a-row, you get two points, as you can look at it as 2 different 3-in-a-rows. Similarly, a 5-in-a-row would get 3 points.</p>
  <p>In the example game, cross wins as it get 9 whereas circle gets only 7.</p>
  <p>I play this a lot; but it's always hard to tell where to put your next move. I've noticed that starting first gives you a significant advantage. To compensate for this, I lower the points of the player who started first by one.</p>
  <p>Is it possible to brute force a computer to learn the best move for every game?</p>
  <p>Thanks in advance!</p>
  <p>Side note: If someone can program this as a simple game with random computer moves, that'd be great. I'm just getting into programming and I'm having a hard time figuring how to do it.</p>