On The Game Design of Four Corners
A unique spin on word categorization games that keeps you challenged until the end!
For the past several weeks, I’ve played a game called Connections. The premise is simple enough: you have sixteen words and they need to be organized into four categories. Occasionally, there are red herrings, e.g. you could have spring, fall, summer, and winter as words but they all work in entirely different categories than “Seasons.” It tickles my autistic brain just right.
Then came Hank Green, famous YouTuber, who released 4x3. This introduced a new spin: reusable words. Each game, one word is used across all four categories, so there are just twelve words to make the four categories. I quickly started playing his version daily as well, as it is certainly a worthy entry into this genre of word game.
However, there’s one aspect of both Connections and 4x3 I knew could be improved upon. Maybe some people see it as a feature, not a bug, but with both games, the final category is a freebie. Once you have three categories, by process of elimination, you know what has to go together. I wanted to see if I could create last category challenge — to make a game that recognizably felt like it fit with these giants whose shoulders I stand upon but would leave you puzzling a bit even with your last play.
Given I do enjoy Hank’s mechanic of having words that could be reused between categories, I decided to try to incorporate that into my design. Ultimately, after a bit of reflection, it came to me while idly scrolling Bluesky: a square. One horizontal category on top, one horizontal on the bottom, and one vertical on each side. Each category would have two reused words, though each reused word would only be used twice. The “Four Corner” words, if you will, bridging each of the four categories.
Since merely guessing a category correctly does not ensure you have figured out the category’s corner words, this fulfills my desire for a bit of an endgame challenge. Say you have guessed three categories correctly. There are two words still left in the word bank — at least a bit of a hint, you know these two go together. But the vertical categories still have three words each that could go with them. You have to match those two with a pool of six words in order to lock in the last two corners and secure your victory.
This creates an elegance in game design that makes things more mechanically interesting than Connections while providing more of challenge than either it or 4x3 — both of which are still fantastic games. But my hope is that Four Corners catches on as an extremely fun and rewarding entry into this genre that stands on its merits as something special rather than just a clone of what already exists.