Draft — not published. This guide and the game it describes are both behind the owner gate while the game is in review. The public name is not settled either: Four in a Row is a working title, and every mention of it on this page will need re-reading when the real one is chosen.
Seven columns, six rows, and gravity. You drop a disc into a column and it falls to the lowest free space in it — you choose the column, never the square. Get four of your own in a straight line, in any direction, before the other side does.
The goal
The board is a grid seven wide and six tall, standing up. Two sides take turns dropping one disc at a time: Ember, the antique gold one, and Coral, the deeper orange-red. A disc always lands on top of whatever is already in that column, so the board fills from the bottom up.
The first side with four of their own discs in an unbroken line wins. The line can run across, straight down, or diagonally either way. When it happens the four are ringed and struck through, so there is nothing to argue about. If all forty-two spaces fill and nobody has four in a line, the game is a draw — it happens, but not often.
Controls
- Tap or clickAnywhere in a column to drop into it. The whole column is the target, top to bottom, so on a phone you are aiming at something about six times taller than a disc.
- 1–7The columns, left to right.
- NStart a new game. R does the same, as does the refresh button in the top bar.
- EnterOnce a game is over, play the next one. Space works too, and so does tapping anywhere on the board.
- GearOpens the settings sheet — opponent, difficulty, your colour and who goes first.
On a mouse or trackpad, the space your disc would land in shows a faint version of it before you commit. A full column stops taking discs and says so.
The two modes
Versus the computer
The default. You choose three things before the first game and they stick until you change them: which colour you play (Ember or Coral), who drops first (you, the computer, or random), and how strong the opponent is.
Who goes first matters more here than in most games — the opening move is a real advantage. If you are losing more than you would like, that is the setting to look at before the difficulty one.
Pass & play
Two people, one device. Ember always opens, the board hands back and forth, and the difficulty, colour and first-move settings disappear from the sheet because there is nobody to apply them to. The status line names whose turn it is and shows the disc they are about to drop, and the two discs are told apart three ways — antique gold against ember coral, a clear step of lightness between them, and a different centre mark on each (a filled core on Ember, an open ring on Coral) — so nobody has to squint at the board, and nobody who cannot separate the two hues is left guessing.
Pass & play keeps its own running tally, separate from your record against the computer, so an evening of games with someone else never touches your other numbers.
The three difficulty levels
All three play the same rules; what changes is how far ahead the computer is looking.
Easy — makes mistakes
Looks one move ahead and no further. It takes a winning line when it can see one, blocks yours about half the time, and otherwise plays near the middle. It will hand you the space directly above its own disc roughly half the times that is on offer, which is the single most common way a beginner loses this game — so Easy is a good place to learn what that trap looks like from the winning side.
Medium — a real challenge
Searches five moves deep. It never misses a win that is one drop away and never fails to block one, and it will not usually walk into the trap above. About one move in four it plays the second-best move it found rather than the best — never one the search has already proved loses, but enough of a gap that a player who builds a genuine double threat gets to cash it.
Hard — searches as deep as it can
The same search, run until its time budget runs out — up to nine moves ahead — and it always plays the best move it found. It sees the traps, it sets them, and it counts the parity of the board in the endgame. It is beatable, but you have to earn it.
Hard is not a perfect player. This game is solved — the first player can force a win with flawless play — but nothing here is doing that, and it isn't trying to. Hard is an opponent that punishes every loose move and finds most of the good ones, which is the setting worth playing if you want to get better.
Tips
Take the middle column
The centre column is on more four-in-a-row lines than any other — a disc there can be part of far more winning lines than one on the edge. If you are going first, open in the middle. If you are going second, take the middle as soon as it is free. Most games between beginners are decided by whoever ended up owning the centre.
Watch what you put underneath
Every disc you drop creates the space directly above it. Before you play a column, look at what your opponent would have if they dropped on top of you — if it completes a four for them, you have just handed them the game. This is the trap that decides most games, and it is the one thing worth checking on every single move.
Build two threats, not one
A single three-in-a-row with an open end gets blocked. Two of them, needing two different spaces, cannot both be blocked in one turn. Almost every won game here comes down to a double threat — so play moves that build towards two lines at once rather than racing to finish the first one you started.
Stack threats vertically
A threat sitting one space above another threat is deadly: if your opponent blocks the lower one, they fill the space that lets you take the upper one. Setting two of your own winning spaces in the same column, one on top of the other, is the cleanest way to win a long game.
Count the rows in the endgame
When the board is filling up, the columns left tell you who gets which spaces. If a column has an even number of free spaces and you are going second, the spaces in it alternate a particular way — and a threat that sits on a square your opponent will be forced to fill first is worth more than one that sits on a square you cannot reach. This is the part of the game the Hard computer is quietly better at than most people.
Do not chase
Blocking every threat the moment it appears feels safe and loses slowly. When your opponent makes a threat, check first whether you have a win of your own this turn, and second whether you can make a threat that forces them to answer. Only block when neither is true.
Good to know
- The running tally — your wins, draws and the computer's wins — is saved on your device, with a separate one for pass & play. A reset button in the settings sheet clears it when you want a fresh record.
- No account, and nothing is sent anywhere. Clearing your browser data clears the tally and your settings.
- Your settings are remembered between visits, so the game opens straight into the setup you last played. The sheet only opens by itself on your very first visit.
- The board and the discs are drawn by the page itself — there is no artwork to load, so it starts instantly and stays sharp at any size.