How to play Four in a Row
The board has seven columns and six rows. Two players take turns dropping a piece into a column, and the piece falls to the lowest empty space. Line up four of your colour across, down or diagonally and you win the round. Fill the board with no line of four and the round is a draw.
It takes a minute to learn and a lot longer to get good at. The real game is spotting the square your opponent needs before they do, and setting up two threats at once so they can only block one.
How it works on Drawblins
- Create a room and share the invite link with your team.
- The host picks the two players by tapping their names in the participant list. Everyone else watches.
- Tap a column to drop a piece. On a phone the whole column is the button, so you never have to aim for one small hole.
- Play a best-of series. Set anything from one round to ten. Red always moves first, and the colours swap every round so nobody keeps the opening move.
Short on players? A bot fills any empty seat automatically, so the game works even if you are the only person in the room.
Playing against the computer
The bot plays a winning move when it has one, blocks yours when it must, and will not drop a piece that lets you win straight on top of it. Beyond that it simply favours the centre and the squares that build its own lines.
It does not search ahead the way a chess engine would, and that is on purpose. A Four in a Row opponent that never loses is no fun in a party game. Build two threats at once and it will only stop one of them.
Scoring and the series
- Win a round: 150 points
- Draw: 50 points each
- Loss: no points
Points are the same as Tic Tac Toe and feed the same leaderboard as every other Drawblins game, so a duel and a drawing round can share one running scoreboard.
Nobody gets to stall the room
Every turn has a 20 second timer. If it runs out, a piece drops into a random open column and play moves on, so one distracted player cannot freeze a room full of spectators. If someone disconnects mid-match, a bot takes their seat and the series carries on.
Why play it here
Most Four in a Row sites are strictly two people on two screens. This one runs inside a room that holds up to 500 people, so the match becomes something the whole team watches together: a tie-breaker, a warm-up while people are still joining, or a winner-stays-on ladder between longer games.
It shares the room, host controls, moderation and leaderboard with Draw & Guess, Caption Clash and the rest, so switching games never means sending a new link.
Want something with more players at once? Dots and Boxes and Ludo both seat up to four, with the rest of the room watching.