Other variations included the terni lapilli (three pebbles at a time) from the Roman Empire, three men's morris from various parts of Asia, and Picaria from Native Americans. The name tic-tac-toe  came about when the British name of noughts (zero) and crosses  was first printed in a scholarly journal in 1858.

No one knows the Roman name for it, but scholars call it ROTA, Latin for wheel.  ROTA boards were painted, scratched or scribbled everywhere that Romans went. It probably kept a lot of bored Roman soldiers busy. Scholars guess that ROTA is a three-in-a-row game like tic-tac-toe.