Why raindrops?

On a rainy afternoon everyone ends up indoors, and sooner or later someone is at the window watching the drops. They gather on the glass, then run down in little streaks and collect at the bottom. Plenty of kids have raced two raindrops down a car window, picking one each and willing it to go faster.

A four-in-a-row game already runs on gravity, so the pieces became raindrops and the board became a window pane. Storm mode is the thunderstorm version. Every 8th drop, lightning flashes, the window flips over, and every drop runs to the other end. A line you were counting on can come apart, and a new one can form where nobody was looking.

A bit of real four-in-a-row history

The upright version of the game, where pieces drop down slots, is also known as The Captain’s Mistress. A popular story says Captain Cook spent hours playing it in his cabin. The author of tradgames.org.uk, a site on the history of traditional games, found no evidence that the story is true.

The version most families know arrived in February 1974, when Milton Bradley began selling it as Connect Four. That name is a trademark of Hasbro, which bought Milton Bradley in 1984. The designers credited are Howard Wexler and Ned Strongin. Wexler says he invented the game in 1973. His son David has described how it started: his father noticed that strategy games were played flat, wondered what would happen if you played one standing up, and worked it out with plastic tubes and ping pong balls.

In October 1988, two people solved the game, working separately. James Dow Allen announced his solution on October 1. Fifteen days later, Victor Allis announced his, written up as his master’s thesis at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. Both found the same answer. On the standard board of 7 columns and 6 rows, the player who goes first can always win with perfect play, and the winning first move is the middle column. That board can hold 4,531,985,219,092 different positions, so perfect play is a job for computers. Our Hard cloud looks seven drops ahead. That’s strong, but it isn’t perfect.

The three clouds, and the storm

• Easy: drops its raindrops mostly at random, but it will block you when you’re one drop away from four.
• Medium: looks four drops ahead.
• Hard: looks seven drops ahead and likes the middle column.
• Storm mode: every 8th drop flips the window. It works with any cloud and with 2 players.

How to play

• Tap or click a column to drop a raindrop. It runs down the glass to the lowest free spot.
• Line up four of your color across, up and down, or on a slant to win.
• Play the Cloud at Easy, Medium or Hard, or play 2 players on one device. Who goes first switches every game.
• On a keyboard, press 1 to 7 to drop in a column, or use the arrow keys and Enter.
• In Storm mode, every 8th drop flips the window upside down and every drop runs to the other end. If both colors get four at once, it’s a draw.
• Your wins against each cloud are saved on this device.
• Sound is on to start. Tap 🔊 to mute, or 🎵 for music.
• Earn 3 stickers in this game for your QuickBOP sticker book.

Tips

Start in the middle. The middle column is part of more lines of four than any other. The solved game opens there too.

Watch the slants. Lines on a slant are the easiest to miss. Check them for your color and for the other one.

Make two threats at once. If two different spots would each give you four, the other side can only block one of them.

Count down to the storm. In Storm mode, the line under the score shows how many drops are left before the flip. The flip turns each column’s stack over, so the drop at the bottom ends up on top. Before the 8th drop, check what your rows will turn into.

Your turn

The window at the top of this page is already wet. Pick a cloud or a friend, choose Classic or Storm, and play.