With the graphical wizardry of Nebulus from Hewson served to us in our last instalment, you’d now expect our bar to be set pretty high in the Your Sinclair Top 100, so when what looks like a square version of Connect 4 strolls up at No.#29 – calling itself Think! – we’re instantly sneering at it with disgust. However a phrase containing the words “judging” and “book cover” should also be remembered when you look at this game from Ariolasoft UK.
Think! first appeared on the ZX Spectrum in 1985 from both the RamJam Corporation and Tigress Marketing Ltd, and this strategy game at first glance appears to be nothing more than a rehashed version of Connect 4 – as said above – but after a few games you soon find out that Think! is more than that. Played on a 6×6 square board, each player takes it in turn to push a square onto the playing area, either along the horizontal (A-F) or on the vertical (1-6). Your ultimate goal is to make a line of four squares in your colour, the problem is one push from the oppositions square can upset your entire goal.
I’ll be honest here, I took to Think! with instant disgust. I’d just come from Nebulus and the idea of playing a basic looking board game did not impress me one bit, especially one I’d never heard of, and one I had to learn the rules too. However, my bias towards the game was completely unwarranted as after a few games I was really enjoying attempting to outmanoeuvre the ZX Spectrum. Yes the graphics are extremely simple and there is nothing mind-blowing about what is being delivered, but what we do have is something us old gamers constantly gripe about, something we accuse today’s Next-Gen games of missing all the time – Think! has shedloads of gameplay!
I played Think! for truly ages; I remember looking up wondering how much time had passed on the evening I was playing. There is no score monitoring my achievements, no goal counter, no clock telling me how many hours I wasted in front of the screen, all I had was an internal satisfaction gauge letting you know that I was either smarter or dumber than a 48K ZX Spectrum and I was happy with that.
Think! is a game I wish I had found sooner rather than later.
Originally published July 30, 2016. Updated June 30, 2023.
