Play NYC 2019: Fourzy Hands On is Four by Fun

Published: August 14, 2019 12:00 PM /

Previewed By:


fourzy hands-on - booth

One of the first games that I got to check out at Play NYC this year was Fourzy, a mobile game from family-run MindIsle Games. A reimagining of the classic game Connect Four, Fourzy is available for Android and Apple mobile devices and is currently in beta, which I got to get a hands-on preview of.

I’ll start this off by admitting I never played much Connect Four as a child; I was always a fan of Clue and Go Fish. However, for those of you reading this from areas of the world where Connect Four isn’t a thing, Fourzy makes it incredibly easy to get into the gameplay from the get-go with helpful tutorial boxes. It starts you on basic mechanics, though I did get to see some of the more advanced ones—but more on that later.

fourzy hands on game screenshot
Advanced sand mechanics.

The first thing to catch my eye about Fourzy, which I absolutely loved, were the graphics. They’re crisp and clean, and the token icons (actually the individual “fourzies” that you play) with are very cute without being cutesy and overboard. Or maybe I just have a thing for tiny stars dressed up as wizards and for cyclops orange octopi—these options are equally likely. The bright colors were eye-catching and the overall design just screamed out “fun!”

The gameplay is easy to start with, where you battle an AI and the first of you to get four in a row wins. The first obstacles you encounter are bushes, which stop the movement of tokens across the board. As the game progresses, the obstacles are more varied and include apples that squish into sticky jam, arrow tiles and sandpits that stop or slow your movement. The fourzies that you get to use as tokens are also more varied, with each having their own unique designs and names.

Overall, I enjoyed Fourzy. It’s more strategically complex than you think at first, once different tiles and obstacles start coming into play. While I got similar vibes to match-3 games at first, that feeling quickly vanished as the different strategies needed to play became more apparent. It was also deceptively easy at the beginning, and I fell into many traps by thinking the AI was dumber than it actually was.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O96paW1sVNM

After speaking to the devs at Play NYC and finding out that Fourzy is aimed at a demographic of parents playing with their kids, the simplicity of the game rules and the complexity of the actual gameplay makes sense, and it fits very appropriately in that demographic.

Fourzy is developed by MindIsle Studios and will launch in fall 2019 for Android and iOS. It is currently in beta.

Have you tried out Fourzy in beta? What other games would you like to see MindIsle reimagine? Let us know in the comments below! Check out what else we saw at Play NYC by going to our Play NYC 2019 Coverage Hub.

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Courtney
| Former Staff Writer

Courtney Ehrenholfer is an aspiring novelist and screenwriter, and current journalist who greatly enjoys video games, especially those of the point and… More about Courtney