After not-very-extensive testing with my irl friends, I have come to the conclusion that Connect 4 is best played under ludicrous time constraints using a chess clock.

I've created a discord bot to facilitate the playing of these games :)

Adding people to my private testing server and releasing the bot into the wild are both less-than-ideal options currently. I have created a single-purpose server for playtesting the bot.

If you are interested in playing with the bot, join said testing server using this discord invite. To prevent spam, only the first 25 people can join. (If you are reading this after that link has expired and you are not a bot, send me a message and I'll get you a single-use link)

To start a game, send 4!start with a ping to the user that you want to play with. For example, you would send 4!start @_iPhoenix_ to play with me. The bot will create a new discord thread and add both you and the other player to the thread.

It will wait for the other player to play their first move by sending a message to the thread with a number from 1 to 7, corresponding with each of the numbered columns:

Then the first piece drops and your time starts counting down:

Then the second piece drops and your opponent's time starts counting down, etc.


After each move, you get 750 ms added to your clock. This incentivizes fast play.

I just finished adding win detection and flagging (running out of time) to the bot. Tomorrow I'll add an Elo ranking system (I was going to do glicko or glicko2 but Elo stores one number instead of.. more than one).

Double post, but big update- I just added elo and all games are now ranked! I currently am world champion.

TRIPLE POST but I have moved the bot to my pi and improved the Elo system. I think I'm done actively developing the bot!

If you'd like to invite the bot to your own server here is the link.

Thanks, man! Nice bot, thanks for uploading it.