During a summer holiday by the sea, many years ago, I invented a variant of Connect 4 together with Errico De Lisi and Giuseppe Sguera. We called this game Doh!, after Homer Simpson, of course.

Back from vacation, I wrote the rules of this game on a FidoNet area that dealt with board games and played a few distance games with other users of that primitive amateur network – at the time I didn’t have access to the Internet yet, especially considering that my modem ran at 2400 baud.

Years later, searching for my full name on a search engine (and who hasn’t done that?), great was my surprise to find not only that old rulebook I had sent [the site has since disappeared, as it was hosted on Geocities], but also its translations in English and in Czech on sites specialized in board games, and myself listed in lists of board game inventors…

Here are the rules of the game:

  1. It is played by two players on a rectangular game board 7 squares wide and 6 squares high.
  2. Players take turns placing a token of their color in the lowest square of a non-full column.
  3. Whoever manages to compose the four vertices of a square with their tokens and announces it by exclaiming “Doh!” wins. The squares can be straight, diagonal or skewed; moreover, by convention, you also win by placing your tokens on the 4 vertices of the 7 × 6 rectangle that makes up the entire game board. The image provides examples.
The marked black tokens form a skewed square. The unmarked black tokens form a straight square. The marked white tokens form a diagonal square. The unmarked white tokens form the special non-square.

The marked black tokens form a skewed square. The unmarked black tokens form a straight square. The marked white tokens form a diagonal square. The unmarked white tokens form the special non-square.

If anyone starts playing Doh! please absolutely let me know!