Four in a Row

Setup

A grid seven columns wide and six rows deep, standing upright — forty-two slots in all. Two players: one drops red discs, the other yellow.

Every disc carries its colour's letter as well as its colour, so the board can be read without relying on colour vision.

Red moves first. The board starts empty, nothing is hidden and nothing is shuffled: both players see the entire position at all times.

How to play

On your turn you drop one disc into any column that is not already full. You choose the column and gravity chooses the row — the disc falls to the lowest free slot in that column and stays there.

A disc, once dropped, never moves and is never removed. There is no capturing and no passing: if it is your turn and any column has room, you must play into one.

The aim is four of your own discs in an unbroken line — four across a row, four up a column, or four along either diagonal. There are sixty-nine such lines on the board, and completing any one of them ends the game.

Because a disc lands on top of whatever is already in that column, every move you make also decides which slot your opponent can reach next. That is the whole tension of the game: a good square for you is very often the square you have to hand over.

A column holding six discs is full and no longer accepts a play. When every column is full the board is out of moves.

Controls

Tap anywhere in a column to drop a disc into it. The whole column is the target, not the individual slot, so you never have to aim at the square the disc will land in.

A full column does not accept a tap and says so if you try. The board is also inert while it is your opponent's turn.

The rail above the board names whose turn it is in words and shows which colour is yours, so the turn is never something you have to infer from the discs.

When somebody wins, the four discs of the winning line are highlighted so you can see how it happened.

The board does not mirror in Arabic. Column one is on the left in both languages, because two players sharing one board must be looking at the same thing.

Scoring

There is no score inside a game. The board produces a win, a loss or a draw and nothing else.

On your profile a win pays 15 points, a draw 5 and a loss 2 — a little above XO, and well below the long games.

Four in a Row is rated and moves the same ladder as chess. It is a full-information game with no luck in it, so a result between two people is worth putting on a ladder.

Rating moves only in an online match between exactly two people. Practice against the bot and games on one phone pay nothing and change nothing.

A turn left unplayed for two minutes is forfeited to your opponent, so an abandoned game never sits open forever.

Winning

You win the moment four of your discs stand in an unbroken line — across, up, or along either diagonal. Play stops there and the rest of the board is never filled.

If all forty-two slots fill and neither player has made a line, the game is drawn, and a draw pays both players.

Leaving the match forfeits it, and so does letting a turn expire. Either way the other player takes the win.

The game was solved in 1988: with perfect play the first player wins, but only by opening in the centre column. Every other opening move is at best a draw, and some of them lose.

Tips

The centre column is in more winning lines than any other. Taking it early is worth more than any single threat.

Count parity. On a full-height board the first player wins on odd rows and the second on even ones, so which threat you build matters as much as where.

Watch for the double threat — a move that completes two open-ended threes at once. The opponent can only block one.

Never play a disc that hands your opponent the square directly above it.

A threat you cannot yet complete is still worth building, because it forces your opponent to answer it and lets you choose where the next disc goes.