How to play

Token Tetrad is Connect 4 with two of Hasbro's twists added: Pop Out and Power Discs. Get four of your discs in a row — across, down or diagonally — to win. Against the computer you play Red and it plays Yellow. Who moves first alternates each game.

• Drop: with the switch on Drop, tap a column and your disc falls to the lowest open space.
• Pop: switch to Pop and tap a column whose bottom disc is yours. That disc pops out of the bottom and everything above it slides down one space. The switch springs back to Drop afterwards. A pop can make four for you — or for your opponent. If one pop makes four for both players at once, the player who popped wins.
• Power discs: two of Hasbro's power discs are in the game, the Anvil and the Bomb. Each player gets the same set, chosen at setup, and each disc can be used once per game. Tap a power disc button to arm it, then tap a column. A power disc counts as one of your discs once it's on the board, and it can be popped like any other.
  • Anvil: drops to the bottom of the column, knocking out every disc that was there. It needs at least one disc to knock out.
  • Bomb: after dropping it, tap a column whose bottom disc belongs to your opponent to blast that disc out. It needs an opponent's disc on the bottom row.
• Draw: the game is a draw if the same position comes up three times, or if the player to move has no legal move.
• Levels: Easy, Medium and Hard are the same computer player looking ahead less or more. Hard is its strongest game. At every level it gives the same answer in the same position every time.
• Undo: against the computer you can take back as many moves as you like. There is no undo in two-player games.
• Tally: wins, losses and draws are kept on this device, separately for computer games and two-player games.

The Oracle

The Oracle is your optional advisor in games against the computer. Tap 🔮 to open it and it stays on duty at every one of your turns until you close it. It does not advise in two-player games.

It uses the same search as the computer's Hard level: for every move you could make it imagines each reply, each answer to that reply, and so on, assuming both sides play their best, then scores the move by how that ends. It stops after a fixed number of positions examined, not a time limit, so the same position always gets the same answer on any device. At Easy and Medium the computer looks ahead less than The Oracle does.

A green tag means that move forces a win in that many of your turns; red means it loses against best play; grey means a certain draw; amber is the look-ahead score when no forced result is in sight (bigger is better for you). The score weighs the lines you could still complete — one, two or three of your discs along a line the opponent hasn't blocked — plus discs near the centre and unused power discs.

The best move is marked on the board in gold. Tap another option in the list to see that one instead. The Oracle only advises you; the computer plays its own game regardless.

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