Digitising giant Connect Four for easier event gamification

Resources Digitising giant Connect Four for easier event gamification

Connect Four is a classic game. It’s a classic because it’s so incredibly simple – it only takes reading the name to grasp the rules, but it also offers players a compelling opportunity to flex the strategic muscles of their mind.

Supposedly there are 4.5 trillion game board positions, and 42 different ways to win, and yet the entire game can be contained quite adequately on a phone screen, and played in a matter of 30 seconds to three minutes.

This is why Connect Four is an ideal game mechanic for use in gamification – the application of play to achieving real-world outcomes like marketing, promoting loyalty, improving education, and creating visitor engagement at events.

Giant wooden or inflatable Connect Four sets, often branded or at least in branded colours, have been a fantastic tool for creating positive interactions between attendees, and generally elevating the overall event experience.

However, these giant Connect Four sets come with all the usual drawbacks that large physical assets have. In this article, we’re considering not only how the modern digital equivalent overcomes these drawbacks, but offer new levers for businesses to pull when it comes to engaging visitors and improving exhibitor outcomes.

Traditional giant Connect Four sets: A bona fide crowd pleaser

Maybe you were the king or queen of the classroom on a rainy lunchtime as a kid (reigning monarch doesn’t quite have the same ring to it). Maybe you destroyed your partner or group of friends picking up an old set in a cafe or a pub over coffees and cake.

Whatever your history with Connect Four, it seems to have a pull on everyone. Even if you were roundly trounced on those rained off lunch playtimes or that cafe gathering, the simplicity of it means you can always foresee next time being better…

And that’s why it’s a bona fide crowd please for gamifying your events.

A giant game of lawn chess or checkers doesn’t work because in the former’s case, you’ll get people struggling with the basic rules, or one player accusing another of cheating when they’re faced with “castling” for the first time in their life, and even in the latter’s case, the player turnaround is so long people will get bored and you’ll struggle to push into double figures for the day.

A game of Connect Four will seldom go on longer than two minutes.

Customise a giant, premium wooden set to your branded colours, include your logo, optimise its overall design, and hold a tournament if you like. You could use this in all sorts of ways, for example:

However, for all the increased traffic, for all the positive feeling, and for every “win” this might bring to your business, the giant physical Connect Four game comes with some significant downsides.

Storage and set-up blockers for giant Connect Four sets

The clue is in the fact that it’s a “giant” Connect Four set. It needs to be giant to get enough attention at an event where it’s all going on and everyone’s fighting for visitor eyeballs. The standard sets and travel sets won’t cut it. But that makes for a potential logistical headache.

The thing needs to be packed up and shipped to events, and stored when it’s not in use. It might not sound like too much, but when you consider all the specific event kit that brands need to store, this can take up significant real-estate and be a real headache – often at unexpected times of the year.

For brands, a giant custom branded Connect Four set is for life, not just for the events that it’s purchased for.

Limited branding options that are hard to change

Here’s the additional issue with that. If it’s purchased and it’s branded, it’s branded once when you place the order, and updating its visuals can be expensive and a pain to organise.

Hiring out a set is an option that covers both this issue and the previous issue, but that’s even more limiting in the sense that it’s going to be a generic colourway, like the classic blue grid and red and yellow pieces, for example. A hired set will look like a hired set and give a less premium look to your event presence.

Two-player requirement limits business interactions and overall engagement

While Connect Four has a fast player and game turnaround, and people waiting to play can understand what’s going on (unlike chess, where most people could be watching grandmasters play and not really understand what’s going on), it’s still only there for two players to play at a time.

And it’s a board game. It’s not exactly a renowned spectator’s sport.

It’s kind of like when the pool tables at a bar are already in use. You stack your coins to indicate you’re in the queue, and you wander off. Unless you’ve walked into a real-life Colour of Money situation, it’s probably not worth hanging around for.

Missing pieces means missing opportunities

Here’s the other thing – particularly if you own your own custom branded set. What about if you lose a piece? Maybe that only affects games going to the very end of the board but it’s still not a great experience for those that get there.

Lose a few more pieces so players are having to use their hands to indicate where their piece would be, and it starts to reflect poorly on your brand. If you can’t maintain this simple game, how will you be able to fulfill your orders on time, or manage a functional customer service helpline?

Pairing an online Connect Four game engine with a big screen

The beauty of customising an online game of Connect Four with gamification platforms like Drimify is that it can be played on a large touchscreen, and essentially render all of the above issues null and void.

You can’t lose playing counters from a digital game. If you’ve got an internet connection and a device to play it on, that’s transport taken care of. Because it’s digital, you can have more than two players playing simultaneously. Your branding can be updated instantly and easily with the uploading of new files or hex codes for your counters, grid, and background.

But the digital format goes far beyond just overcoming the limitations on the giant physical version.

A game with more real estate and opportunities for branded messaging and storytelling

The major difference between online Connect Four and physical Connect Four (giant, regulation, or standard), is that you’ve got more than just the game screen through which to communicate with your target audience.

To run through a typical online connect Four gamification experience, you have:

That’s four additional screens that participants are interacting with that possess far more functionality than a physical version of Connect Four can bring to the table for your business.

This generic example is including a data collection form where you’re actively collecting participant data prior to them playing, and a CTA button at the end to redirect them to a strategic page, plus the potential show them a branded video, and add to all this that you can customise the background to suit your project in addition to the game grid and game counters.

Scalability of online Connect Four across event sizes and formats

Being digital, you’ve now got scalability in a way that wasn’t even conceivable when you were using giant Connect Four sets.

Now you can have a giant custom Connect Four game on a touch screen device at multiple events simultaneously. If your game was built using Drimify’s Connect Four maker, they could be the exact same game, or if needed to, you could clone them and adjust the branding and messaging on them accordingly to suit your objectives.

Because the game is accessed through its own direct link, in addition to being playable on giant touch screen terminals, you can also make it accessible through a QR code so more people can play on their phones. This not only means more people can play at any one time, but it means they can access the game from anywhere you put the QR code within the event grounds – maximising your reach, and encouraging people to head to your event stand through your branded messaging.

Leaderboard functionality to trigger effective competition across attendees

Now one element the physical game had over your digital Connect Four was the possibility to have tournaments, pitting visitor versus visitor, and even having knockout tournaments.

This comes with the aforementioned issue of only being able to engage two players at a time.

Because the Connect Four game you can customise on Drimify calculates a points score based on how efficiently a player wins (or loses), everyone that plays can compete against each other through a leaderboard option you can enable.

Consider what’s a bigger beacon to beam out from your event stall:

While there’s no denying holding a knockout tournament on a giant Connect Four set is aesthetically pleasing, it involves resources to organise and limits overall participation.

For business purposes when it comes to gamifying your event and engaging visitors at scale, the online Connect Four game with the leaderboard is better.

An event gamification solution that can be measured in analytics

This one might be the most major one for you using Connect Four for business purposes.

Every aspect of your operations are measured in some way. Man hours are carved out in time, equipment and software in cost in return on investment, but you custom giant connect Four set? Your teams are really just guessing on that one.

To the eye test, that big wooden set might be the hit of the whole event – it’s a game that was only invented relatively recently, but it’s mix of simplicity and sophistication is undeniable – however, closer inspection, or a survey, may indicate that it was only interacted with by 12 out of hundreds of people.

With Connect Four games customised on Drimify, you’ve got highly useful statistics available at a glance. You can see how many times the game was loaded, how many people started playing, how many people completed the game, and by integrating trackers, you can also see how many people followed your CTA button (if included) to visit your strategic site. And of course, you can export all the data to see people’s interaction with your game lined up with all the details they provided in your data collection form.

You can use this to improve and refine how you use Connect Four to amplify your event communications, and even your overall approach to event gamification.

The most versatile Connect Four gamification solution for your business

There’s no denying the appeal and elegance of a custom-built giant Connect Four set to elevate your event experiences, but fundamentally, going digital and using screens and QR codes give you as an event organiser or exhibitor way more tools to work with.

Additionally, when you use a custom Connect Four generator like Drimify, you’re also getting access to an extensive library of other game mechanics to utilise when designing event gamification, which only adds to its overall ROI.

Ultimately, the digital Connect Four option is the event gamification solution that can better adapt to your goals and grow with your business.

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