Four in a Row

There isn't much mystery to what this is: drop coloured pieces into a seven-column grid, try to line up four before your opponent does. The design has been public domain in every meaningful sense for decades, and this implementation — maintained by one developer, on and off, since 2013 — doesn't try to add anything to it. What earns it a place here isn't invention, it's execution: a genuinely well-built, actively-maintained take on a game everyone already knows, that happens to need almost nothing from a touchscreen beyond a single tap.

Two real problems, both fixable, neither the game's fault

Worth stating plainly before anything else, because both would have mattered if left alone. The built gh-pages output, as committed, points its module script, its stylesheet, and its logo image at https://kenrick95.github.io/c4/... — absolute URLs back to the author's own live site — rather than the relative paths that would let it stand on its own. It would have technically loaded here, but every visitor would have been quietly fetching assets from a third-party site indefinitely, an unannounced and unnecessary dependency for something that already has its own built files sitting right next to that broken reference. Rewriting those to relative paths was a small, mechanical fix.

The second issue needed a judgement call rather than a find-and-replace. The settings screen originally offered "Online: Human player vs human player," and reading game-online-2p.ts shows exactly what that does: it opens a WebSocket to wss://c4-server.fly.dev, the author's own production matchmaking server, in any build served outside local development. That's not a broken feature failing safely — it's a live backend that would start receiving real traffic and real player names from this shelf without its operator ever agreeing to that. Nothing about hosting an open-source client should quietly volunteer someone's personal server for a load it never opted into, so that mode has been removed from this copy. The two offline modes and the AI-vs-AI spectator mode are entirely self-contained in the client bundle and don't share that problem.

One tap, any height, works every time

The actual touch design barely needs describing because there's so little of it, and that's the point. main.js's bundled game logic reads column selection from wherever a click event lands inside the canvas — no drag, no precise vertical targeting, no separate button per column — and a tap anywhere within a column's width does exactly what a click does. Testing this on a simulated 390×844 touch phone confirmed the whole loop working: a tap dropped a red piece into the tapped column, the AI opponent responded automatically with a blue piece a moment later, and a second tap in a different column repeated the exchange cleanly, with the board's percentage- of-width layout keeping every column comfortably within thumb reach. The settings dialog beneath it — a native <dialog> element with radio buttons and a text input — needed nothing special to work with touch either, which is the advantage of building on standard HTML controls instead of custom-drawn ones.

Plain, and fine with being plain

Visually, this doesn't reach for much: flat white and light-grey circles, a pale grey board, red and blue pieces, no sound, no animation beyond the drop itself. That's a legitimate choice for a game whose entire appeal is the rules everyone already knows, and it doesn't get in the way of anything — but it does mean the recommendation here rests entirely on "does this work well," not "is this worth seeing." It does work well: the AI opponent responds sensibly rather than randomly, the win detection covers all four directions correctly in testing, and thirteen years of on-and-off maintenance (last commit this week) shows in how little broke once the hosting issues above were sorted out.

Where that leaves it

A 7.5 fits a game that does exactly what it sets out to do, with controls about as frictionless as this shelf sees, let down only by presentation that never tries to be more than functional and a design that isn't asking to be judged on originality. Good for a fast round when you want something familiar; not a game to specifically make time for.