Tue 3 Apr 2007
It really bothers me that I can’t figure out how to properly play the children’s game of Connect Four. For some reason, I’ve never been able to grasp the strategy of it and consistently fail to spot the patterns which would enable me to both stop the opposing player and to make any serious play at success.
It’s not that I expect that I’m so smart that I ought to be superior at everything — even if I were mediocre I could accept that. I am mediocre at the game of chess and I fully understand and accept my limitations in that arena. But Connect Four seems so damn simple, yet I’m unable to beat a computer player at anything beyond the simplest and easiest level. It’s so frustrating, even when I concentrate and try to observe strategy in motion I keep being surprised and lose, from when I was a kid all the way up to today.
There seems to be something about the mechanism or patterns in the game which my apparently feeble brain is unable to grasp. Oh well, at least it’s not anything important.
April 3rd, 2007 at 1:58pm
Man, I thought I was the only one, and I’m usually really good at strategy games. We can share in this shame, I guess.
April 4th, 2007 at 8:46pm
Okay, so I’m like ‘oooh, I bet there is a connect 4 for linux’ and indeed there is one for kde. Let’s see if I know how to play anymore. I install it. No matter what if I enable the computer the computer never goes. And *I* can’t go so it just sits there cycling between “ah ah ah one go at a time” and “it’s not your turn” and “hold your horses”.
Apparently this KDE game won’t play correctly except under KDE.
Then I realized that Four-in-a-Row would be the gnome version. Apparently I also suck at connect four.
April 7th, 2007 at 1:22pm
fluffy, R343L:
I feel so much better knowing that I’m not the only one with this deficiency. And R343L, the four-in-a-row gnome app is what I was using and triggered this post. ;-)