Online Connect Four: Connecting audiences to your messaging

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Connect Four is an easy to play strategy game that knows no borders, and knows no barriers to entry.

Horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, the aim is to get four of your chips in a row while thwarting your opponent’s efforts to do the same across a seven-column-wide vertical grid.

It’s literally the name of the game.

Connect more than just chips: Connect Four as gamification

If we consider chess to be the intellectual peak of board games, and draughts or checkers to be its slightly less impressive cousin five rungs lower down in the pecking order, then connect four is fathoms below them both. It’s still a sophisticated game, and a sound Connect Four strategy can really separate good players from average players, and great players in kind, but it’s still a fairly fast experience.

This is why it’s a great casual game, ideal for adapting to the purposes of gamification – which is the application of game mechanics to more effectively achieve tasks. Basically, the game play engages a user, and through the game or experience’s configuration and messaging, the user is influenced to think or feel a certain way, or is encouraged to take a desired action.

It’s redirecting attention in pursuit of productive outcomes.

Think about trying to market a new blockbuster movie with a very distinct aesthetic. With online Connect Four, you can put a video loop mimicking the distinct style for the background, and you can code the design of the connect four chips to different characters or strongly associated colours from the movie.

Because a game of four in a row takes a minute or two to play to completion, you can also include a data collection form, an intermediate screen featuring the trailer, and even include a call to action button (CTA) on the end screen directing participants to pre-book their tickets or sign up to the appropriate streaming service. This is all a succinct and quick experience. Participants enjoy a quick dose of strategic play, while submitting data, and paying attention to your marketing messaging, and they’re given a direct path to your important web page.

Try to do it with chess or draughts, and it becomes impossible, as these are far longer games to play, and really too strategic and complex for a fast mobile marketing game experience.

Connect Four – that classic board game that feels like it’s always been around, but in fact only found its way into stores in 1974 – is in a sweet spot for game mechanics that are suitable to achieving varied communications objectives.

Connect Four for online marketing games

Whether it’s to integrate within a loyalty app, provide variation to a multi-step marketing experience, or – as already discussed – promote a new product like a movie or consumer good, Connect Four – customised on an enterprise-grade gamification platform – can basically tick all the boxes.

It’s fun, it’s fast, and it’ll remind a lot of people of their childhoods, so it carries a major hit of nostalgia in its favour (another major boon in marketing – the “good old days” effect).

While it works well just as a game to engage users, if you’re able to factor in higher concept ways in which the game play itself can factor into the campaign, the more likely it is to resonate with your target audience.

For examples:

• Any kind of promotion with prominent use of the number four, such as a fourth iteration of a sports shoe or piece of tech
• Anything nostalgia-themed or schooldays themed, as it was such a staple of so many childhoods across generations
• Anything nautical themed, because before connect four was called connect four, it was called “Captain’s Mistress,” and supposedly played in the 1700s – extensively by one Captain Cook

Online Connect Four to complement EX campaigns

Customers like to play, but so too do employees, and what works well with one typically works well with the other.

Employee experience (EX) – rewarding and engaging with teams to make working at your organisation a positive experience – is now a major aspect of HR and internal communications, and gamification is a proven needle mover in bringing EX campaigns to life.

With it being a point-scoring mechanic, and offering a dose of strategy to the casual game mechanic category, it can be customised and coded to larger themes within multi-step experiences with global leaderboards.

It can break up sequences of quizzes and instant games with more varied gameplay, sustaining engagement over time, while still being customisable to deliver intermediate content screens to get across key messages to your people.

Connect Four to add variety to online educational experiences

Because four in a row is a strategy game, pitting players against the computer, it has its place in early education learning experiences.

It’s fundamentally there to encourage students to use their brains, look for patterns, and set traps within the confines of a finite board and defined rules, so a four in a row game can serve as a mental warm-up for young students, either before more curriculum-specific modules, or before the use of more traditional teaching methods.

Easy creation on gamification platforms with connect four templates

If the idea of custom-built online four in a row games for better audience engagement sounds like good news, we’ve got even better news…

They’re incredibly easy to make!

Using gamification platforms like Drimify, which have specific Connect Four generators, allow you to simply fill in the gaps, adding your design and branding for the counters, the grid, and the background, and making extra little tweaks to suit your campaign.

It’s not quite as simple as just putting your campaign brief into a machine and getting a perfectly optimised connect four marketing game out of it, but it’s not a million miles off.

It’s a no-code solution that you can develop a working knowledge of in under 10 minutes, and then you can boost target user engagement across marketing campaigns, add interactivity to elevate your events, the same way you would with giant Connect Four sets, and add fun to educational experiences and internal comms.

Start using online Connect Four for better audience engagement

It might just be a simple solved game, but it’s a popular solved game, and some people take it incredibly seriously because it’s addictive and compelling.

This is why it’s a perfect digital vehicle to customise for engaging users around all manner of business objectives.

To get started, open a free Drimify account, and begin customising the Connect Four template to see what’s possible.

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