A simple way is to keep the board as a flat list of nine cells, index 0‑8, and just treat that as the game state. That way you can copy the list for recursion, and you don’t have to shift around a 2‑D array. Keep a separate list of the indices that are still empty so you can loop over just those when you’re generating moves. Wrap the move generation in its own function that takes the current board list and returns the best index. Inside that, call a minimax helper that copies the board, places the symbol, flips the player, and recurses. If you want to tweak the AI later, just change the scoring or add a depth limit in that helper. You could also expose a tiny “play” function that applies a move to the board and checks for win/lose/draw, so the UI layer stays clean. That keeps the code tight, the logic in one place, and you can swap out the minimax for something more elaborate without touching the rest.

Just keep it simple – show the board with the numbers 1‑9 so the player knows where to type, read a line with input(), strip it and try to convert to an int, then subtract one to get the board index. If it’s out of range or the cell’s already taken, just print a quick “invalid move” and loop back. No fancy loops, just a while True that breaks when a valid move comes in. Then update the board and flip the player. That’s about it, keeps the UI light and easy to tweak.

Yeah, return a small status tuple – like (board, player, winner). Then the main loop can just break if winner isn’t None or the board is full. Keeps everything tidy, no extra flags floating around.

All good on my end for now, but if something odd pops up with the win check I’ll hit you up. Thanks for the heads‑up!