Daily Connect Four

Common questions

Frequently Asked Questions

Who do I play against?

A daily AI opponent. There's no live multiplayer here — the AI's move pattern is fixed by a daily seed, so everyone faces the same opponent behavior on a given day.

Do I go first?

Yes, you always drop the first piece.

How do I win?

Connect four of your pieces in a row — horizontally, vertically, or diagonally — before the AI does. If the 7x6 board fills up with no winner, it's a draw.

Is today's AI opponent the same for everyone?

Yes. The AI's decision-making is seeded by the UTC date, so every player faces the same AI behavior pattern for the day, even though each game plays out differently based on your own moves.

How smart is the AI?

It plays solidly but not perfectly. Two rules come before anything else: take an immediate win if one's on the board, and block your immediate win if you have one. Outside of those, it picks a column at random, weighted 4x toward the center column over the edges — so it won't hand you the game by playing in a corner, but it also isn't planning two moves ahead. It's a heuristic, not a full solver.

Is there a strategy that reliably beats the AI?

Set up a double threat — a single move that creates two different ways to win on your next turn. I built the AI to look only one move ahead: it takes an immediate win, blocks your immediate win, and otherwise picks a center-weighted random column. It has no lookahead beyond that, so a genuine double threat beats it every time — it can only block one of the two columns, and you take the other.

Does my progress save if I close the browser?

Yes, your in-progress board and your final result for the day are saved locally in your browser.

What happens if I close the browser right after dropping a piece, before the AI responds?

The game checks for exactly this on reload: if the saved board has an odd number of total pieces while the round is still marked "playing," that means your move landed but the AI's reply never got the chance to. Instead of treating it like it's your turn again, it picks up right where it left off — the AI takes its pending move (with the same 500ms pause as normal) as soon as the page loads, so you don't get to sneak in an extra turn or lose your move to a refresh.

Does the AI take longer to respond on harder positions?

No — it's a fixed 500ms pause every single time, whether the position is trivial or the AI is about to block your winning move. The delay is purely cosmetic, there to make the exchange feel like a turn rather than an instant swap; the AI's actual decision (check for a win, check for a block, otherwise weighted-random) is computed instantly and just held for half a second before it lands on the board.

What are the actual odds the AI picks the center column over an edge?

On an empty board, the seven columns are weighted 1-2-3-4-3-2-1 from left to right, so the center column gets 4 of the 16 total weight — a 25% chance — versus roughly 6% for either edge column. Those exact odds only hold on a wide-open board, though: as columns fill up, a full column drops out of the pool entirely and the remaining weights get redistributed among whatever's still playable, so the center's advantage compounds even further as the board fills in.

If I hit "Play Again," am I facing the same AI as today's official challenge?

Not exactly. Play Again seeds the AI's random fallback from a fresh synthetic key generated for that round, not from today's real date — so its win-check and block-check logic behaves identically (those aren't random), but its weighted-random column picks in open positions will differ from what today's actual daily opponent would play. Today's one real result — the one that counts toward your stats — is only ever set by the first board you play, seeded by the actual UTC date.

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