A single question to all

Jeffinberlin, InvisibleJon, Sedjtroll, Outside Lime, dnjkirk, Clever Mojo, and several other posters here have published designs, so the premise of your question is flawed.

However, if you feel your game was stolen, that is definitely unfortunate - have you contacted the designer or the company involved? Which game was it? Since it was clearly not stolen from here (as your join date is well after all the 2009 winners were published), was it someone you knew in person?

in the us you can get pattents for mechanics though, but i havent heard of stuff like that since richard garfield pattented everything revolving magic the gathering.

ichbin, i agree with cog on this, there very well maybe too many variables. additionally published designers do get busy and so dont have as much time to visit all the boards and so forth.

btw jamestk and my self have self published or published games.

i think jamestk has like 3 current games on kickstarter as well.

I think what we have here is parallel development. There have been many Tic-Tac-Toe games done on a bigger grid and it is not hard to believe that someone else came up with the same idea. This is a common problem with abstract games being that they have simple rules sets. The simpler a game the more likely someone else will duplicate it on their own without any pre-knowledge. Especially one based on a well known game concept.

Sedjtroll concepted Eminent Domain almost entirely on this site. Invisible Jon has 100 games up on his blog right now, literally.

Your premise is flawed, so you're still making mistakes.

On top of that, like Dralius said, lots of tic-tac-toe variants, including ones on larger boards, are thought up every year.

To be honest, I feel he understated it, I would have said THOUSANDS and THOUSANDS of tic-tac-toe variants are "re-discovered" every year. The one in question (tic-tac-ku), I'm pretty sure I played on grid paper in middle school. I wouldn't have said it even deserved a separate BGG entry. Not only that, the publisher had a pre-existing product which happens to already have a board that's divided into 9 smaller 3x3 grids. If you think they went out of their way to steal a concept on how to play tic-tac-toe on something like that... then yes, I agree with you that you're naive, but not for the reason you think. ON TOP OF THAT, their rules and your rules are different, your scoring system is not the same as EITHER their "basic" OR "advanced" rules.

So let's tally up:
-you're wrong about whether people have or have not shared things on this forum.
-you're wrong in saying they copied you, because even the rules are different.
-you're naive about how hugely widespread tic-tac-toe variants are.
-it was premature and irrational for you to pull down your blog, because IF someone had stolen your game idea, that would be the first thing you could have pointed to when bringing it up to the publisher or in a court of law.

So I guess good luck not talking about any of your games on the internet? I'm sure it's also a well informed decision, like the above ones.

You were wrong about what you said, because you felt that they had copied you, even though the SCORING and GAMEPLAY were different. If BGG wasn't down right now, I'd link a list of all the tic-tac-toe family games and point out that you could say they -all- copied you, just with different SCORING and GAMEPLAY. Rat Hot (and a variety of other games) use 3-box dominoes, just with different SCORING and GAMEPLAY.

Your work is derivative of "classic" games. which is fine. So are thousands and thousands of other people's, every year. which is also fine. When you start accusing those other people of copying YOURS, even when the vast majority of the actual game is different (aside from the parts shared by the classic it's derived from), then you've got a serious perspective issue.

You have more than 50 games?
More games = bigger possibilities to have similar games published before or after.
(Trust me - It happens often)