Both games genuinely develop a four-year-old's mind, but they work on different cognitive muscles, and knowing which muscle your child needs most will help you choose wisely.
The short answer, for parents in a hurry: draughts builds sequential planning and spatial reasoning over a longer arc of development, while Connect 4 builds pattern recognition and visual logic in fast, satisfying bursts. A four-year-old is developmentally ready for both, though each will ask something slightly different of her. If you can only have one game on the shelf right now, draughts will grow further with your child and reward years of returning play. If your child finds sustained attention tricky at this age, Connect 4 offers an earlier foothold into strategic thinking and a quicker sense of mastery. Neither choice is wrong, and for many families the best answer turns out to be both.
What makes this question worth asking carefully is that strategy games at four are not merely entertainment. The research is clear that structured play with rules, turns and an opponent is among the richest cognitive experiences available to a young child. Adele Diamond at the University of British Columbia has shown that games requiring children to hold a goal in mind, inhibit impulsive moves and update their thinking in response to an opponent's action directly strengthen executive function, the cluster of mental skills most predictive of later academic success. A draughts board and a Connect 4 grid are, in that sense, two different pieces of developmental equipment.
What the research says
Adele Diamond's work on executive function confirms that turn-based games requiring forward planning strengthen working memory, inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility in young children. These are the same skills that later underpin reading comprehension, mathematics and emotional regulation.
Jean Piaget observed that children between three and seven are in a period of preoperational thought, beginning to represent the world symbolically but not yet reasoning in the fully logical, reversible way older children manage. Strategy games sit at exactly the right edge of that zone. They ask a four-year-old to imagine a future state of the board, something Piaget considered a genuine cognitive stretch, without requiring literacy, numeracy or abstract language. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Golinkoff, in their research on playful learning, make a related point: games with rules are the context in which children most naturally practise goal-directed thinking, because the rules make the goal visible and the consequences immediate.
Lev Vygotsky's concept of the zone of proximal development is equally useful here. A game that a child can almost win against a patient adult, but not quite, is a game that is doing developmental work. Both draughts and Connect 4 can be calibrated precisely this way, because an adult can simply play at reduced strength, making the game a conversation rather than a contest.
Draughts, known in North America as checkers, is a game of sequential decisions on a shared grid. Each move narrows the set of future possibilities, and a child who grasps this, even dimly, is practising what cognitive scientists call prospective reasoning. At four, this need not mean calculating three moves ahead. It can be as simple as noticing that moving a piece to a particular square will leave it unprotected. That single observation, repeated across many games, builds the habit of looking forward rather than reacting only to the present state of the board.
The diagonal movement of draughts pieces also makes spatial demands that Connect 4 does not. A child must track the board in two axes simultaneously, and the promotion rule, by which a piece reaching the far side becomes a king with extended powers, introduces a medium-term goal that gives a four-year-old something to aim for beyond immediate capture. Jeffery Trawick-Smith's work on the developmental value of structured play suggests that this kind of layered goal structure, short-term and long-term objectives nested within the same game, is particularly effective at sustaining attention and building persistence.
Explore Jaques London's traditional games collection, including wooden draughts sets made to last a childhood and beyondConnect 4 is architecturally simpler than draughts but cognitively different rather than cognitively lesser. The grid is vertical, the turns are fast and the winning condition, four counters in a row, is visually explicit. This means that pattern recognition, rather than sequential planning, is the primary skill being exercised. A four-year-old playing Connect 4 learns to scan a grid for emerging lines, to block an opponent's sequence and to create her own, often without being fully conscious she is doing any of it.
Patricia Kuhl and Andrew Meltzoff's research on how young children learn has established that perceptual pattern recognition in early childhood is a foundational cognitive process, not a lesser one. A child who becomes fluent at spotting a three-in-a-row threat in a Connect 4 grid is building the same visual-spatial vocabulary that will later serve her in mathematics, reading and scientific reasoning. The game also has a satisfying physical action at its centre: dropping a disc and hearing it fall into place gives immediate sensory feedback that makes each decision feel consequential, which matters enormously for sustaining the engagement of a four-year-old.
Beyond the specific cognitive skills each game develops, both draughts and Connect 4 teach something harder to measure and arguably more important at four: the ability to wait, to accept that the world does not move at your pace, and to tolerate the frustration of a plan that fails. Kenneth Ginsburg, writing on the importance of play for healthy child development, describes board games as one of the few contexts in which young children willingly practise self-regulation, precisely because the stakes feel real but the consequences remain safe.
On self-regulation and play
Kenneth Ginsburg notes that games with clear rules and turns give young children one of their earliest opportunities to practise voluntary self-control, waiting, inhibiting impulse and recovering from disappointment, in a context they have chosen and enjoy.
Losing at a board game is, developmentally speaking, valuable. A four-year-old who loses a game of draughts and agrees to play again is doing emotional work that no worksheet or screen can replicate. The key is that the adult plays with warmth, without making winning the point of the session, and without letting the child win artificially every time, since children generally know when they have been gifted a victory.
Jaques of London has been making games since 1795, the oldest games company in the world, and there is something the company understands about materials that matters here. A wooden draughts set has heft and presence. The pieces feel like something when a child picks them up, and that physicality shapes the quality of engagement. A well-made wooden set will outlast childhood. It will not fade, crack or lose pieces in the way a plastic grid game often does. It carries a different kind of message to a child too: this is an object worth caring for, worth returning to, worth passing on. That sense of a game as an heirloom rather than a disposable product is part of what Jaques has offered for two centuries.
Browse Jaques London's board games collection, where craft and play tradition meetIf your four-year-old has a short attention window, finds extended waiting difficult or is newer to structured games, Connect 4 is the more accessible starting point. Games are brief, the goal is clear from the first turn and there is always a moment of satisfying resolution. Once she is comfortable with the rhythm of turn-taking and the idea that every move has a consequence, draughts becomes reachable.
If your child already enjoys board games, sits happily for ten minutes of structured play and likes the idea of pieces that move in distinct ways, draughts is ready for her now. The ceiling of draughts is considerably higher: a committed player can spend a lifetime deepening their understanding of the game, and the skills it builds, spatial reasoning, sequential planning and strategic patience, deepen proportionally.
The most thoughtful approach is not to choose between the games but to use them for different occasions. Connect 4 is ideal for a quick ten minutes before dinner, a moment when a child needs engagement but time is short and energy is fraying. Draughts suits a quieter Sunday morning, when both adult and child have space to linger without the clock pressing.
Rotating between the two games also prevents the habit formation that can make a single game feel stale. Each time your child returns to draughts after a run of Connect 4, she will bring slightly sharpened pattern recognition to the board. Each time she returns to Connect 4 after draughts, she will bring a more patient, forward-looking eye. The games, played together, make each other better.
A note from Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff
Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Golinkoff's research on playful learning finds that children who experience a variety of structured, rule-based games develop more flexible thinking than those who specialise in a single type of play. Variety in game play, as in everything else, is a form of cognitive nutrition.
Very probably yes, with the right introduction. Two-minute attention is not a sign that a child is unready for strategy games; it is often a sign that a game has not yet been introduced in the right way. Begin with a half-board of draughts using only six pieces each, or play Connect 4 with the goal reduced to three in a row rather than four. Shorter games with lower piece counts give a four-year-old the experience of completion, which is what builds the appetite for longer play. Alison Gopnik's research on how young children learn through exploration suggests that children extend their engagement when they feel genuine agency in the game, which a simplified rule set supports rather than undermines.
Entirely, and this is one of draughts' great virtues. The game has no text whatsoever. The rules are spatial and visual: pieces move diagonally, captures jump, kings travel further. A four-year-old who cannot yet identify a single letter can grasp all of this through a short demonstration and two or three turns of guided play. Montessori's principle that young children learn through the hands rather than through language is vindicated perfectly by draughts, where every concept is embodied in a physical move on a visible board.
Connect 4 does have a lower ceiling than draughts, and a child who plays it daily from four to six may begin to find it comfortable rather than challenging by the time she is seven. The solution is not to put it away but to raise the difficulty: introduce a rule that you both announce your intended win condition before the game begins, or play on a larger grid. The game's core skill, pattern recognition in two dimensions, remains genuinely useful at any age. That said, if long-term challenge is your primary criterion, draughts is the more enduring investment. Its strategic depth increases steadily as a child matures, and many adults who learned the game at four are still finding new ideas in it decades later.
Draughts, chosen in a well-made wooden version. It is playable from age four, grows in complexity through childhood and adolescence, requires no batteries, no screen and no replacement parts, and a quality set from a maker with Jaques of London's heritage will still be on the shelf decades from now. The game has been played in recognisable form for centuries, and there is a reason for that. Connect 4 is a wonderful complement to draughts, but if only one game is coming into the house, the draughts board is the one that earns its place for longest.
Britain's oldest toy maker. Every toy open-ended, wooden, and built for exactly the kind of play the research recommends.