It’s been an eventful game of connect 4. It’s certainly tougher than the daily challenges when I could safely assume each hand was solvable with sufficient use of rot13(haqb).
I won on the first day of the month, then had a string of three losses. Games 2 and 4 were perhaps close, but game 3 was a walkover to the bad guys. Game 5 was a crunch moment – a loss would mean four Reds in a row horizontally and the rest of the month to stew. Indeed, I had a rough middlegame after dealing the first row of cards – and somehow I managed to rescue one of the strangest “almost-losses” I have ever seen. A true display of rot13(junggurshpxrel) from an app I do not entirely trust.
As for why I consider this one of my “strangest almost-losses”, that’s something you have to figure out for yourself (Incidentally figuring out how to proceed is a good test of your analytical skill).
Having avoided an early defeat, it seems we are headed for a long war of attrition as both sides jockey for position. The fourth week is where things get spicy as possibilities of diagonal and vertical connect fours come into play.
Edifying Thoughts of a Spider Solitaire Addict 