Drop discs and get 4 in a row to win
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The best quick two-player-style strategy game on a browser — short enough for a five-minute match but with enough tactical depth to reward pattern recognition and forward planning. Better than tic-tac-toe, faster than chess.
With perfect play from both sides, the first player always wins. In practice, both players make mistakes, so the second player wins regularly. The key insight is that the first player must play the center column on move one to maintain their theoretical advantage.
In October 1988, James Dow Allen and Victor Allis independently proved that the first player can always force a win with perfect play. Allis also wrote a solver that demonstrates this with a complete game tree.
The center column (column 4 of 7) is the strongest opening move. Discs there contribute to the most possible winning lines. Playing away from center on the first move concedes a significant positional disadvantage.