When was connect 4 invented

Not much is known of this man except that he has a patent in his name for a type of 3D stacking Tic Tac Toe game that involved dropping or stacking in a row. This particular patent was filed on the 6th of August While there have been several versions of both 2D and 3D stacking game concepts that have emerged over time, it is the one sold by Funtastic that is considered to be a direct game that Connect 4, as we know it today, is derived from. In order to play, players would drop wooden beads into the pole slots, which then allowed for a row of 4 beads to form in any direction.

Sound familiar? To me, it sounds similar to the game we play today, except we use colored discs instead of wooden beads. If you want to find out more about how exactly the modern version of Connect 4 was invented, take a look at the following clip from Howard Wexler on how the game was created. Connect 4, as you know it today, is the game that was trademarked and released by Milton Bradley in If you have a Connect 4 game that was bought after , then you have the original Milton Bradley version of the game.

Milton Bradley was actually a game company that was started by Milton Bradley in Massachusetts in After releasing the Connect 4 game in , Milton Bradley was bought out by Hasbro just 10 years later, and so Connect 4 became the property of Hasbro.

If you have not yet heard that the game is solved yet, perhaps now is the time for you to look it up. If you have read that Connect 4 is a solved game, it is true — not a myth. What does it mean that Connect 4 is solved? Basically, it means that there is a way for a player to win at the game every time, if they follow a specific strategy.

There is also a switch at the right and left hand side of the board that is used to release the pieces from their slots thus resetting the board.

The official pieces for Connect Four are 42 black and red checkered playing pieces 21 of each color. To move: Each player takes alternating turns. I played over and over again, all trial and error, always assuming both the player and opponent.

I was most anxious not to have the game result in a stalemate. After I was satisfied that the game played well, I began to call upon friends and family to play. Everyone agreed that 7 cylinders across and 6 ping pong balls high was the way to go. I then substituted checkers for ping pong balls. Finally, I felt that simply turning over the game and spilling out the checkers would not be a fun thing to do.

So I attached a simple bar at the bottom of the columns to hold up the checkers while playing; moving the bar backward or forward would release the checkers. It is not clear exactly when the first stacking Four in a Row game appeared. This is Robbie Bell's Four Balls game which he dated to the early 20th century.

The earliest claimed ancestry is a legend surrounding early explorer Captain Cook. It is stated that Captain Cook spent so much time stuck in his cabin playing the game against his fellow travellers naturalist Joseph Banks and botanist Daniel Solander on his voyages that it become known as the Captain's Mistress.

The author has spent some time investigating the veracity of this but has found no evidence that it's true. In a book by Robbie Bell, there is a picture of a 4 in a row game that he calls "Four Balls".

It is a wooden game of reasonable quality made from Mahogany with beech balls for pieces that dropped into wooden chutes. Bell says that the date of the game is uncertain but he estimates that it is Edwardian c. On the bottom of the game in gold lettering is inscribed "Remy Martin Cognac". The author has located an advertisement from the s for the Remy Martin Cognac board and while he is loathe to disagree with R. Bell, who was a great games historian, in this instance it seems quite unlikely that the game does date from the early 20th century and more likely that it arrived on the scene a few years after Connect 4 first appeared