Have you ever thought maybe Connect Four needed a remix? Well someone definitely did, because they invented MixUp!
MixUp a little more complicated than regular Connect Four — instead of having two colors of pieces, one for each player, it has three colors (blue, green, and red) in a mix of three shapes (moon, lightning, and raindrop), which both players are free to use.
At the start of the game, the players choose their objectives – one will be aiming for four in a row of the same color, while the other will be trying to do the same with shapes. (For anyone not familiar with Connect Four, this is done by taking turns dropping one tile to the bottom of its column, wherever that may currently be, until one of you makes an unbroken line of four in any direction.) The result of this is that victory conditions are no longer in direct conflict, so something your opponent placed may become the key to your success, especially if you’d both forgotten that two-by-two squares are a valid victory condition in this version of the game. Whoops. On the flip side, it’s a lot easier to miss when someone’s getting close to winning. (I staged the above game for photo purposes by playing against myself; I was legitimately trying to strategize for both sides, and set up an amazing ‘whichever spot you block, I’ll win with the other’ situation… completely by accident. It was wild.)
All in all, I think the MixUp mechanics make Connect Four much more interesting; just be aware that it’s more challenging, too.
