tic
Explanation
This comic presents what appears to be a serious, detailed rules document for a game variant called "Kriegspiel Tic-Tac-Toe." The rules describe an elaborate setup requiring 5 people (2 players and 1 monitor per player, plus presumably an arbiter), where each player has their own private tic-tac-toe board that their opponent cannot see, monitored by a neutral party. There are also 5 public boards that are labeled A through E. The rules go on to describe complex gameplay mechanics involving hidden information, challenges, and scoring.
The humor comes from the absurd over-engineering of tic-tac-toe, which is one of the simplest and most solved games in existence. Tic-tac-toe between two competent players always ends in a draw, making it essentially trivial. "Kriegspiel" refers to a real genre of war games (and a chess variant) that involve hidden information and referees -- serious, complex military simulations. Applying this level of elaborate structure, secrecy, and procedural complexity to tic-tac-toe is inherently absurd.
The comic satirizes the tendency to over-complicate simple things with unnecessary rules and bureaucracy. It also pokes fun at the board gaming community's love of increasingly complex rule systems. The deadpan presentation as a legitimate rulebook makes the absurdity even funnier -- there is no punchline panel, just the rules themselves presented completely straight, trusting the reader to recognize the comedy of applying military-grade game design to a game typically played by children on restaurant napkins.