Connect Four — Where the Board Is Big Enough to Matter
Connect four looks like tic tac toe with more squares. It is a much deeper game, and the reason is gravity: you do not choose a square, you choose a column, and your counter lands on top of whatever is already in it. Every move you make builds the platform your opponent plays from.
That single rule produces the game's whole character. A threat you cannot complete yet still has to be respected, because the square below it may get filled at any moment. Playing under an opponent's winning square hands it to them. And two threats stacked in the same column can only be answered once. Where tic tac toe has 255,168 possible games and is completely solved in the head, connect four has over four trillion positions — it has been solved by computer, but not by anyone sitting at a table.
The computer opponent searches ahead: two moves on easy, four on medium, seven on hard. Between those depths it judges a position by how many lines of four are still open to each side, weighted so three-with-a-gap counts for far more than three scattered pieces. At seven plies hard sees a double threat being set up before it exists, which is the point at which most people stop winning by accident and start having to plan. Easy is beatable on purpose: it sometimes plays a random column instead of its best one, and while it always takes a win in front of it, it will not always block yours.
Two players on one device is the other mode, and the columns are tappable anywhere down their height — you do not have to aim at the one live cell, which matters on a phone. The score above the board tracks both sides plus draws, and whoever starts alternates between games, since the first move is worth something here too. In fact connect four is a first-player win with perfect play from both sides, which is exactly why a fair run of games has to swap it.
The winning four is highlighted when a game ends, including the diagonals, which are the ones that catch people out.
How to play Connect Four
- Choose Easy, Medium or Hard, or "Two players" for someone on the same device.
- Tap anywhere in a column to drop your counter — it lands on the lowest free row.
- Line up four in any direction: across, down, or either diagonal.
- Watch what your move leaves above it. Filling a square under your opponent’s winning row hands them the game.
- The winning four is highlighted, and the score above the board keeps a running total.