A few months ago I received an email from the current owner of enclose horse, inquiring if I was willing to sell gerrymandle. I was not interested.
Enclose horse was a big inspiration for me, since it's such an elegant game. So I'm very sad to see that they have decided to copy my game.
I know that Gerrymandle is not a completely unique game, I was personally inspired by an old NYT article. But I like to think I at least gave my own spin on the genre.
I guess this is just the world now, but I am very disappointed
FWIW, imitation is flattery -- enclose.horse is done, I left the daily game weeks ago after they started phoning in slop daily designs. This is a cheap move but it shouldn't make a difference to your audience.
Specifically it is the frequency-based keyboard layout of traditional hot-metal Linotype machines. If you made a typo, the custom was to fill up the spoiled slug by running your finger down the etaoin shrdlu rows, and start fresh on the next slug. On rare occasions the layout clerk would accidentally let a shrdlu slug go to press, to the amusement of the readership.
Telegraph operators ranked the letters as etaonrish.
Wordle is inspired by Mastermind, sure, but I don’t think it’s fair to call it a copy. I enjoy Mastermind; I do not enjoy Wordle¹.
Even the simplest details are different, like e.g. in Wordle you know which letters are in the right or wrong places but in Mastermind you only know some are but not which.
¹ And because this is HN, I have to point out that that is just a personal preference, it does not in any way reflect on you, the reader. You are free to enjoy or dislike whatever you want.
not shameless as here is cut and paste from the landing page when all that renders is plain text
elect.horse is a daily gerrymandering puzzle: the horse is losing the popular vote to the cow, the donkey and the goat, and you draw equal districts on a hex map so it wins the most seats anyway. It needs JavaScript to play.
I only clicked because I have a horse, with whom I spent a few miniuts out in the paddock before daylight listening to the coyotes whoop it up so close you could smell
there not dog , but not bad, odor.
You can get a feel of the state of the software industry through the replies to this comment. Specifically, the countless times people counter with "Oh, well everything is a copy of everything", citing some X that's just like Y. Except X is merely inspired by Y and in reality has far more original ideas that make it completely different. In this case this is a literal carbon copy, and people are automatically rushing to defend it. When the 'vibecoders copying indie games 1-for-1 and reselling them on Steam' debacle happened, these people probably wanted to congratulate the ripoff makers for their good business sense and brilliant use of AI.
Yeah, when I saw elect.horse I didn't think "Ooh, a new game I've never imagined before". This is a problem, but you can show the problem as part of a fun game. Like Monopoly the point isn't that this is an awesome game, the point is that it's a real problem, but if you have fun that's great too. If you get somewhat good at the game, you can understand the problem better.
The hex grid (rather than, say, square, or random Voronoi regions). The fact that some hexes have 1 voter and some have zero (rather than, say, all hexes having 1 voter, or any having more than 1). The circular colored dot indicating the voter's party (rather than, say, a picture of a horse, or tinting the entire hex). The "Hint", "Reset", and "Submit"/"Call election" buttons below the grid, in that specific order; and (I assume) the nature of the hints. The "health bar" graphic depicting the number of horse voters and donkey voters.
Now that I find a more compelling argument than "Hey you used hexes". It might still turn out to be a similar "obvious" choice but unlike the hexes it's not the first idea that comes to mind.
Every creative work is a copy of a copy; that’s just culture. The commons of ideas is a collective work, until someone pulls them out of the air, reworks them into something “original”, and plops them onto a page.
Ulysses is a copy of the Odyssey, Minecraft was a copy of Infiniminer, Stardew Valley copied Harvest Moon, Fortnite copied PUBG, film directors copy and spread each others’ techniques and storylines all the time. George Lucas even admits that Star Wars was heavily based on Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, while Kurosawa’s film was derived from historical plays and John Ford’s westerns.
I wasn't there for Stardew, but Fortnite definitely does not start out copying PUBG, the transformation is arguably more damning - Fortnite was a different and much less interesting game (now "Save The World" mode), and it got the "Battle Royale" mode everybody knows about today because PUBG popularized this idea of "battle royale" shooters and Epic could see how to do that with their existing IP very quickly and clean up.
Ok and what did Infiniminer copy? What about games like Papers Please or Obra Dinn, or Blue Prince. Yes, games can have different influences, but the idea that everything is a copy is totally incorrect. Some stuff is way more unique and original than others.
"Blue Prince" is heavily inspired by earlier works, those works just aren't video games. You could say the same all the way back to ADVENT, the Colossal Cave Adventure of the 1970s being inspired by adventures in an actual cave.
Of course good games do something we haven't seen before or do it better, but they are also invariably products of a wider culture. A big part of why Animal Well doesn't need to explain itself is that a modern video game player knows how this sort of game works and so when they get Slink or B Wand or similar they realise they can explore places they couldn't reach before.
Really? So I can ditch Minefraft for Infiniminer and get an identical experience? Same mechanics, items, bosses, worlds, achievements, structures and all?
Or are you perhaps using a game that was merely inspired by another concept but expanded on it in brand new ways to defend a game that is literally identical to what it's copying?
Fun! One less than intuitive piece is that, as far as the game is concerned, evenly dividing a district 50-50 stops that district from counting toward anyone's majority.
So if Blue was only present in a single district where its the majority, you could have ten more districts all evenly tied between Purple and Orange, and Blue would still win.
Aren't they both ripoffs of the 2019 boardgame Mapmaker?
(Great Kickstarter, they played games of it on the steps of the supreme Court, and had pledge levels where you could have copies sent to your Congresspeople or the court)
Not really, they're not ripoffs. Maybe loosely inspired, but besides the hexes and the theme, they look to be mechanically different. The board game is a competitive versus game, not a set of puzzles; it has varying numbers of voters per hex; the game board is of a preset shape and not freeform.
The game in the post is basically identical to Gerrymandle, they're far more similar to one another than either game is to what you've posted.
But, seventy hours of play should mean that if you narrow down that the correct answer has exactly two exits, costs nothing and is green, it's not lavatory or bookshop :D
It's like Wordle but for Blue Prince rooms. You're trying to guess a specific room, the game will tell you what you got right or wrong about the last room.
Nice. I assume you've seen the Sudoku puzzles at Logic Masters Germany? Heavily reminiscent.
One suggestion, and maybe I'm just holding it wrong: when I started the daily puzzle, I had to scroll down to read through the rules, which I assume starts the timer while I'm still learning the symbols. It would be nice to have an interim page with a summary of the symbols so the timer doesn't start immediately.
I already play Blueprintle (as Wordle is to the dictionary, so Blueprintle is to the Blue Prince room directory) Wordle and Connections but maybe I will pick up one of the horse games when I grow bored of one of them
I don't have colour blindness, I have a colour calibrated display, and I find it hard to differentiate between them.
Also, Firefox blocking Canvas elements does something really funky to the hex tiles making it harder. Allowing access does make the tile background change to pink/yellow-green instead of them all being lilac/lavender/purple animations.
The colours make it too difficult for me on a good display, and the dancing 'thing' (wheat?) doesn't help.
Seems to be fine on my firefox with ublock enabled. Though the hexes sometimes are confused about which groups I'm modifying, which I'm not sure if that's a firefox thing or not.
Color also seems fine to me. Horse is bright blue and the other is lavender.
It seems that you're indirectly citing my comment, so I have to reply.
You really have trouble differentiating between 5fd3ff and b58cff? These are dramatically different hues (65 degrees on the colour wheel).
I mean, maybe the site is A:B testing different hue combinations, or there is a technical fault happening for some users, but if you really have trouble differentiating those two hues, one of your two declarations at the beginning of your comment must be false.
Those two colours have a contrast ratio of 1.50:1 according to https://www.accessibilitycolor.com/#fg=5fd3ff&bg=b58cff - the baseline for WCAG is 4.5:1 for AA standard. Look at the text on the background as calculated and tell me that these are good colour choices... The colourblind examples this colour pair gives are even worse.
So yes, while I can tell the difference between these two colours doesn't make it good to play or an acceptably accessible choice even for those with good colour vision. They are objectively too similar.
"I find it hard to differentiate between them." ... "The colours make it too difficult for me on a good display"
Either you are in denial about a personal vision deficiency, or you bought your display on Temu. Or you're just trying to show some sort of vision solidarity with the colour blind, which, fair enough. We should all be more thoughtful of accessibility.
We all know that these aren't good colours for the small percentage of people with colour blindness. I literally directly addressed it in my root post, to then get confirmation that the person has colour blindness. Citing a page literally regarding being accessible to the colour blind is not making your case.
They are objectively, blatantly clearly different hues to the vision normal. Which is why I addressed the comment wondering if the person had colour blindness, which they of course do.
FWIW, they are pretty distinct hues, and are easily discernible. I only mention this because a lot of people go through life not realizing they suffer some form of colour blindness, so it's worth knowing. Another possibility is that you're looking at it on a very poor display.
EDIT: I've now been "downvoted" multiple times for this harmless observation, and now have a clown declaring me a "bad llm". Is this what HN is reduced to?
I know I've got deuteranopia. That doesn't help. I still can barely see the difference. What would have helped is picking two colors which weren't so close for people with such a common issue.
What frustrates me is that this has happened even with color coding in video games where I myself was part of the UI team and flagged the issue a year before release. (Need For Speed, 2015)
> I know I've got deuteranopia. That doesn't help.
Seems like something you should probably declare upfront if you're complaining about the colour choices, right? As is your comment looks weird to the vast majority of people -- and yes, the vast majority of people are not colour blind -- who have no issues with the colours.
Should every colour-based game, chart, display, and so on have colour blind modes or safer colour selections? Sure.
I explicitly noted that someone probably has colour blindness if they can't discern the hues. And it turns out that is the situation in this case, it just wasn't stated.
I didn't discount anything, and that's a simply ridiculous slur. My observation was absolutely correct.
Yes, a very small minority of people have trouble with certain hue combinations.
There used to be a convention on reddit to respond to some comment bots with "bad bot" or "good bot" and the bot would use that feedback to assess if its responses were helpful. I think maybe wikipedia summaries or things like that.
Then I think it became a kind of put down and/or a way of saying certain inauthentic comments seemed insincere. In this context as reply to you, though, it feels pretty inexplicable.
got me wondering how many complaints you see online are one shottable by any decent model with 30 seconds of "i have this issue: . provide easiest working solution" prompting
Yesterday I was watching a tv program online on the legitimate website of the broadcaster, but I was really annoyed at the fact that the video stopped whenever I left the tab. So I opened Chrome's devtools, went to the AI tab ad exposed my complaint. In a few seconds it had analysed all the minified sources of the website, found which tracker was responsible of this, and written a script to disable it. Lovely.
It didn't even occur to me that it was saying republicans and democrats are the same. That's just ridiculous ;-)
Edit: To clarify there's good evidence that people overestimate the degree to which people on the other side of the political divide hold extreme views by about a factor of two. We genuinely are less different than we think. It's not necessary for people to be the same for this to be true.
> To clarify there's good evidence that people overestimate the degree to which people on the other side of the political divide hold extreme views by about a factor of two.
Where can I read more about that evidence?
Because ~70 million of my countrymen have voted for a convicted rapist.
The range of opinions is probably healthier than homogeneity. I think labelling people extremists and pushing them towards the centre would be pretty dystopian.
What is easier to change than people's opinions, is the two party political system which tends to resolve such questions to one of the two extremes based on one side achieving a tiny majority, rather than to the average which is usually a lot more sensible.
Surely you agree that "both sides" think the other side is full of evil politicians that want to destroy the country AND their voters are complete morons?
And surely you can agree that each side has key issues they feel very strongly about (abortion on the left, guns on the right) and again, think the other side's view on said issues are utterly disgusting, right?
And SURELY you can agree that gerrymandering has occurred at various times in the past, from both sides, can't you? For example, take a look at the map of Illinois congressional districts[0]. Perfectly sensible districts here, yessir!
The low IQ take is pretending there aren't places where both sides do in fact behave the same way.
What you'd expect to see in a healthy democracy is people who want to fix the bug, and for a while maybe those who most benefit from the bug fight to keep it but eventually there's a broad public sentiment in favour of fixing the bug and so it simply becomes uncontroversial to fix it. Say fifty years. Give it an extra generation if e.g. civil war breaks out interrupting such considerations.
But Gerry died in the nineteenth century. This practice is almost as old as the United States of America itself. I would say it's as bad as if the US still had slavery, or still had capital punishment, but oh yeah it still has both of those too. Do better.
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Inmates are frequently forced to work for pennies.
Yup. Quoting Wikipedia: "The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude except as a punishment for a crime where the individual has been convicted"
Mandatory "Penal labour" isn't chattel slavery but it would still be recognised as slavery in any modern understanding.
I love daily games. https://maptap.gg/ is my personal favorite! I love the author's little notes and asides as he discusses fun facts from around the world.
enclose.horse was sold off not too long after it was published. The new owners now seem to be doing a shameless cash grab, ripping off gerrymandle.com 1:1, down to some particularly weird UI choices, and the text copy is transparently LLM-generated. It would be one thing if they added some kind of improvement or unique take, but reskinning (with assets you bought) and throwing ads on it is, frankly, just lame.
Enclose.horse was originally created by Shivers as an interesting optimization problem, the kind of thing you'd find in a Leetcode challenge or an Advent of Code puzzle. But after prototyping it, it turned out to be genuinely fun to play, and it grew into a fully-fledged game.
Today, enclose.horse is developed and maintained by Ryan and Praveen. We're constantly adding new features, puzzle mechanics, and quality-of-life improvements based on community feedback. If you have ideas, we'd love to hear them!
The LLM text copy really grinds my gears. It's really not hard to write your own copy. Using LLM copy is disrespectful to your users and tells me you don't give a crap about the quality of what you're publishing.
I'm used to game developers sometimes displaying their political preferences through their art, but I have to say that Gerrymandle's "Win the election for orange." is still quite on the nose!
There's also a colorblind mode where you can always win the election for blue, if that's more to your political preference! I like that mode just for keeping the colors consistent.
It doesn't represent the risk to gerrymandering at all. There are no error bars in voting patterns based on 4 year old data.
Part of the reason this next cycle is looking so bad for Republicans is _because_ of the gerrymandering they tried backfiring on them because they cut the lines too close to try and gain more seats.
I honestly don't get today's expert puzzle. When you start, horse is at 8, donkey is at 10, and cow is at 14. I get two districts for horse, which the puzzle then states "horse wins," but wouldn't the final standing then be
horse: 10, donkey: 10, cow: 14
So cow still wins? Why did it say horse wins on the "See results" screen?
Each district you draw is the only thing that counts for voting.
So, "gerrymandering" the districts to make it so the least popular "party" wins is the objective of the game. What's maybe not clear about the game is that each dot represents one animal and not say another mini district.
the numbers are just the number of hexes for each candidate, what you care about are the number of colored areas / colored squares. If you see 2 or more blue colored squares above the buttons, then the horse wins, which is what you want.
Oh ok. I thought that was the number they were ahead by. So if I was down 8 to 14, I'd have to gerrymander 7 district wins to beat the cow. It makes sense they were the count of the dots.
This was incredibly fun and rewarding, I spent a really long time on the expert puzzle and eventually solved it. I really like that you can use some kinds of deductive logic, as well as trial and error as well! Very very fun.
Hello, I am the developer of gerrymandle.com.
A few months ago I received an email from the current owner of enclose horse, inquiring if I was willing to sell gerrymandle. I was not interested.
Enclose horse was a big inspiration for me, since it's such an elegant game. So I'm very sad to see that they have decided to copy my game.
I know that Gerrymandle is not a completely unique game, I was personally inspired by an old NYT article. But I like to think I at least gave my own spin on the genre.
I guess this is just the world now, but I am very disappointed
Saw your post on Reddit and the positive feedback. Unfortunately in a world of AI, it's trivially easy to copy a game concept.
Thanks for colorblind mode!
Why didn't you sell back at the time?
I didn't build it to sell it, and I enjoy making the puzzles
FWIW, imitation is flattery -- enclose.horse is done, I left the daily game weeks ago after they started phoning in slop daily designs. This is a cheap move but it shouldn't make a difference to your audience.
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I think this is basically a copy of Gerrymandle?
You could add "pretty shameless" before "copy" there. Sheesh.
What next? words.horse which is just Wordle?
words.horse appears to be a blog, but Horsle exists. https://cabletwo.net/horsle/
Can't stop laughing. Genius!
wordle is just a copy of mastermind
Angry birds is just a copy of crush the castle
I consider it only "inspired by"
Mastermind has equiprobability of colors and configurations.
Wordle has etaoin shrdlcu. There is some structure close to interleaved vowels and consonants. Also an arbitrary list of real words.
>etaoin shrdlcu
TIL, this was not a typo and is the ordered sequence of most common letters appearing in English words.
Specifically it is the frequency-based keyboard layout of traditional hot-metal Linotype machines. If you made a typo, the custom was to fill up the spoiled slug by running your finger down the etaoin shrdlu rows, and start fresh on the next slug. On rare occasions the layout clerk would accidentally let a shrdlu slug go to press, to the amusement of the readership.
Telegraph operators ranked the letters as etaonrish.
I always thought it was rlstne. I might be conflating English letter distribution with Wheel of Fortune letter ordering.
Wordle is inspired by Mastermind, sure, but I don’t think it’s fair to call it a copy. I enjoy Mastermind; I do not enjoy Wordle¹.
Even the simplest details are different, like e.g. in Wordle you know which letters are in the right or wrong places but in Mastermind you only know some are but not which.
¹ And because this is HN, I have to point out that that is just a personal preference, it does not in any way reflect on you, the reader. You are free to enjoy or dislike whatever you want.
Indeed, humanity proceeds largely through refinement of existing ideas, not through random leaps.
Some of these refinements are much more important than most new ideas.
And making a gerrymandering game is a relatively obvious idea that I’m sure hundreds of people have had independently.
if letters were colors?
Wordle is just a copy of Lingo.
The Zynga of small cute puzzle web-games.
not shameless as here is cut and paste from the landing page when all that renders is plain text
elect.horse is a daily gerrymandering puzzle: the horse is losing the popular vote to the cow, the donkey and the goat, and you draw equal districts on a hex map so it wins the most seats anyway. It needs JavaScript to play.
I only clicked because I have a horse, with whom I spent a few miniuts out in the paddock before daylight listening to the coyotes whoop it up so close you could smell there not dog , but not bad, odor.
poop.bike
It looks like it: https://gerrymandle.com/
This one doesn't load for me
The horse version feels more fun and cozy.
You can get a feel of the state of the software industry through the replies to this comment. Specifically, the countless times people counter with "Oh, well everything is a copy of everything", citing some X that's just like Y. Except X is merely inspired by Y and in reality has far more original ideas that make it completely different. In this case this is a literal carbon copy, and people are automatically rushing to defend it. When the 'vibecoders copying indie games 1-for-1 and reselling them on Steam' debacle happened, these people probably wanted to congratulate the ripoff makers for their good business sense and brilliant use of AI.
Gerrymandle doesn't have horses
which is itself not a new concept
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/teaching-players-to-rig... (2018)
Yeah, when I saw elect.horse I didn't think "Ooh, a new game I've never imagined before". This is a problem, but you can show the problem as part of a fun game. Like Monopoly the point isn't that this is an awesome game, the point is that it's a real problem, but if you have fun that's great too. If you get somewhat good at the game, you can understand the problem better.
Yes but surely you can see that this is copying much more than just the general idea of a game about gerrymandering.
I don't see it, but maybe you have examples where there are specific choices which were copied?
The hex grid (rather than, say, square, or random Voronoi regions). The fact that some hexes have 1 voter and some have zero (rather than, say, all hexes having 1 voter, or any having more than 1). The circular colored dot indicating the voter's party (rather than, say, a picture of a horse, or tinting the entire hex). The "Hint", "Reset", and "Submit"/"Call election" buttons below the grid, in that specific order; and (I assume) the nature of the hints. The "health bar" graphic depicting the number of horse voters and donkey voters.
Also the unrealistic mechanic where a tied vote removes that district from the total.
Now that I find a more compelling argument than "Hey you used hexes". It might still turn out to be a similar "obvious" choice but unlike the hexes it's not the first idea that comes to mind.
This is probably a better example of prior implementation with many similar design decisions
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1639370584/mapmaker-the...
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/252997
Also who the hell cares if something is a “copy”, what matters is if it’s better or worse
Linux is a copy of UNIX. Who cares
For tools or utilities, maybe that's fine. For creative works like games, no way, I'm calling out rip offs every time I see them.
Every creative work is a copy of a copy; that’s just culture. The commons of ideas is a collective work, until someone pulls them out of the air, reworks them into something “original”, and plops them onto a page.
Ulysses is a copy of the Odyssey, Minecraft was a copy of Infiniminer, Stardew Valley copied Harvest Moon, Fortnite copied PUBG, film directors copy and spread each others’ techniques and storylines all the time. George Lucas even admits that Star Wars was heavily based on Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, while Kurosawa’s film was derived from historical plays and John Ford’s westerns.
I wasn't there for Stardew, but Fortnite definitely does not start out copying PUBG, the transformation is arguably more damning - Fortnite was a different and much less interesting game (now "Save The World" mode), and it got the "Battle Royale" mode everybody knows about today because PUBG popularized this idea of "battle royale" shooters and Epic could see how to do that with their existing IP very quickly and clean up.
True, it was more of a pivot that involved copying PUBG’s successful format.
Ok and what did Infiniminer copy? What about games like Papers Please or Obra Dinn, or Blue Prince. Yes, games can have different influences, but the idea that everything is a copy is totally incorrect. Some stuff is way more unique and original than others.
You seem to be taking "copy" much too literally.
"Blue Prince" is heavily inspired by earlier works, those works just aren't video games. You could say the same all the way back to ADVENT, the Colossal Cave Adventure of the 1970s being inspired by adventures in an actual cave.
Of course good games do something we haven't seen before or do it better, but they are also invariably products of a wider culture. A big part of why Animal Well doesn't need to explain itself is that a modern video game player knows how this sort of game works and so when they get Slink or B Wand or similar they realise they can explore places they couldn't reach before.
Seems like it, though this has a second puzzle with three candidates instead of two
Gerrymandle interchanges the number of candidates: sometimes two, sometimes three, sometimes more
Ah. First time I've seen either.
Clone software they said, it will be good they said
Minecraft is a copy of infiniminer
Really? So I can ditch Minefraft for Infiniminer and get an identical experience? Same mechanics, items, bosses, worlds, achievements, structures and all?
Or are you perhaps using a game that was merely inspired by another concept but expanded on it in brand new ways to defend a game that is literally identical to what it's copying?
With you always working make sure blue wins.
Gerrymandle shows popup asking me to "Create profiles for personalised advertising" at 116 vendors, so I am completely fine with them being cloned.
everything is a copy of everything else. So what? Execution matters
https://words.global
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the more such site the better it is.
Fun! One less than intuitive piece is that, as far as the game is concerned, evenly dividing a district 50-50 stops that district from counting toward anyone's majority.
So if Blue was only present in a single district where its the majority, you could have ten more districts all evenly tied between Purple and Orange, and Blue would still win.
I am a big fan of both enclose.horse and gerrymandle.com. I play both daily.
But this rip-off of gerrymandle.com makes me feel less inclined to continue playing enclose.horse.
And yes, it is a rip-off, not merely a riff on the general puzzle game of this type.
It's akin to joke stealing among comedians. It makes you lose respect for the joke stealer, even if their original stuff is good.
Aren't they both ripoffs of the 2019 boardgame Mapmaker?
(Great Kickstarter, they played games of it on the steps of the supreme Court, and had pledge levels where you could have copies sent to your Congresspeople or the court)
Mapmaker: The Gerrymandering Game, via @Kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1639370584/mapmaker-the...
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/252997
On the steps of SCOTUS, not Congress, curiously....
Not really, they're not ripoffs. Maybe loosely inspired, but besides the hexes and the theme, they look to be mechanically different. The board game is a competitive versus game, not a set of puzzles; it has varying numbers of voters per hex; the game board is of a preset shape and not freeform.
The game in the post is basically identical to Gerrymandle, they're far more similar to one another than either game is to what you've posted.
It's the same developer...
What’s your source on that? The owners of Enclose.horse don’t list gerrymandle as one of their games: https://clevergoat.com/all-games
Shivers (the original developer) sold it to them.
He means that enclose.horse and elect.horse are from the same developers.
(which isn't true btw, enclose.horse was sold by the original developer)
I mean to say that it's owned by the same people
That's what they are saying. That the enclose.horse people ripping off gerrymandle makes them like enclose.horse less.
To the other commenters: @jawns means a rip-off of gerrymandle.com
But even gerrymandle is a rip off of a NYT game that never left beta: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/us/politics/congres...
There's a enough of a branding and storyline difference for me to love elect.horse
It literally says “also by us: enclose.horse”
lol we know it's by the same people as enclose horse, the issue is that it rips off gerrymandle
It's from the same people!
I think the clear association to enclose.horse makes it just another cute take rather than a rip off.
Related: https://enclose.horse/
List of daily "dle" games: https://dles.aukspot.com - warning, it's big.
Mine is the nonogram daily puzzle at: https://lab174.com/nonodle/
Doesn't seem to have https://blueprintle.org/ (which won't make any sense if you haven't played Blue Prince, but unlike Blue Prince itself it is free)
I have played 70 hours of Blue Prince and I still don't know what I'm doing in that game.
But, seventy hours of play should mean that if you narrow down that the correct answer has exactly two exits, costs nothing and is green, it's not lavatory or bookshop :D
It's like Wordle but for Blue Prince rooms. You're trying to guess a specific room, the game will tell you what you got right or wrong about the last room.
Oh, I thought I was trying to figure out some sort of layout by drafting individual rooms for some reason. The instructions were pretty confusing.
Wait what is this site the dles of aukspot? How do you choose - it's overwhelming.
I didn't realize how vast the underworld of dle games was. Brought to you by AI?
hah didn't think my game would be listed there, but it was! https://fivefold.ca
Nice. I assume you've seen the Sudoku puzzles at Logic Masters Germany? Heavily reminiscent.
One suggestion, and maybe I'm just holding it wrong: when I started the daily puzzle, I had to scroll down to read through the rules, which I assume starts the timer while I'm still learning the symbols. It would be nice to have an interim page with a summary of the symbols so the timer doesn't start immediately.
Hah I completely agree! I actually already had that on my task list, I'm adding that exact feature to both the webapp and mobile version this weekend.
one of my daily fun routines: - wordle - enclose.horse
Recommendation: add the two daily puzzles of Sunflowersgame: https://sunflowersgame.com/
I already play Blueprintle (as Wordle is to the dictionary, so Blueprintle is to the Blue Prince room directory) Wordle and Connections but maybe I will pick up one of the horse games when I grow bored of one of them
Also “related”, but only vaguely:
https://xkcd.com/936/
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b3_lVSrPB6w
:D
Anyone else got something horse adjacent?
It's fun but I can barely see the difference between the horse and donkey colors which makes it really hard.
Use this bookmarklet to rotate the hue by +20. You can use it multiple times in a row:
It works best if you add it to your bookmark shortcut list.Sorry for the previous one, it was too long.
I don't have colour blindness, I have a colour calibrated display, and I find it hard to differentiate between them.
Also, Firefox blocking Canvas elements does something really funky to the hex tiles making it harder. Allowing access does make the tile background change to pink/yellow-green instead of them all being lilac/lavender/purple animations.
The colours make it too difficult for me on a good display, and the dancing 'thing' (wheat?) doesn't help.
Seems to be fine on my firefox with ublock enabled. Though the hexes sometimes are confused about which groups I'm modifying, which I'm not sure if that's a firefox thing or not.
Color also seems fine to me. Horse is bright blue and the other is lavender.
It seems that you're indirectly citing my comment, so I have to reply.
You really have trouble differentiating between 5fd3ff and b58cff? These are dramatically different hues (65 degrees on the colour wheel).
I mean, maybe the site is A:B testing different hue combinations, or there is a technical fault happening for some users, but if you really have trouble differentiating those two hues, one of your two declarations at the beginning of your comment must be false.
Those two colours have a contrast ratio of 1.50:1 according to https://www.accessibilitycolor.com/#fg=5fd3ff&bg=b58cff - the baseline for WCAG is 4.5:1 for AA standard. Look at the text on the background as calculated and tell me that these are good colour choices... The colourblind examples this colour pair gives are even worse.
So yes, while I can tell the difference between these two colours doesn't make it good to play or an acceptably accessible choice even for those with good colour vision. They are objectively too similar.
"I find it hard to differentiate between them." ... "The colours make it too difficult for me on a good display"
Either you are in denial about a personal vision deficiency, or you bought your display on Temu. Or you're just trying to show some sort of vision solidarity with the colour blind, which, fair enough. We should all be more thoughtful of accessibility.
We all know that these aren't good colours for the small percentage of people with colour blindness. I literally directly addressed it in my root post, to then get confirmation that the person has colour blindness. Citing a page literally regarding being accessible to the colour blind is not making your case.
They are objectively, blatantly clearly different hues to the vision normal. Which is why I addressed the comment wondering if the person had colour blindness, which they of course do.
I am color blind (red-green) and have the same issue. Not a color-blind friendly color scheme...
FWIW, they are pretty distinct hues, and are easily discernible. I only mention this because a lot of people go through life not realizing they suffer some form of colour blindness, so it's worth knowing. Another possibility is that you're looking at it on a very poor display.
EDIT: I've now been "downvoted" multiple times for this harmless observation, and now have a clown declaring me a "bad llm". Is this what HN is reduced to?
I know I've got deuteranopia. That doesn't help. I still can barely see the difference. What would have helped is picking two colors which weren't so close for people with such a common issue.
What frustrates me is that this has happened even with color coding in video games where I myself was part of the UI team and flagged the issue a year before release. (Need For Speed, 2015)
> I know I've got deuteranopia. That doesn't help.
Seems like something you should probably declare upfront if you're complaining about the colour choices, right? As is your comment looks weird to the vast majority of people -- and yes, the vast majority of people are not colour blind -- who have no issues with the colours.
Should every colour-based game, chart, display, and so on have colour blind modes or safer colour selections? Sure.
You are correct. If you can't tell the difference between purple and cyan you probably have color blindness.
You’re being downvoted because you’re discounting other people’s experiences. The hues are easily distinguished /to you/ but not to everyone.
I explicitly noted that someone probably has colour blindness if they can't discern the hues. And it turns out that is the situation in this case, it just wasn't stated.
I didn't discount anything, and that's a simply ridiculous slur. My observation was absolutely correct.
Yes, a very small minority of people have trouble with certain hue combinations.
bad llm
Uh, what? What is the point of your worthless comment?
There used to be a convention on reddit to respond to some comment bots with "bad bot" or "good bot" and the bot would use that feedback to assess if its responses were helpful. I think maybe wikipedia summaries or things like that.
Then I think it became a kind of put down and/or a way of saying certain inauthentic comments seemed insincere. In this context as reply to you, though, it feels pretty inexplicable.
Good llm
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got me wondering how many complaints you see online are one shottable by any decent model with 30 seconds of "i have this issue: . provide easiest working solution" prompting
Yesterday I was watching a tv program online on the legitimate website of the broadcaster, but I was really annoyed at the fact that the video stopped whenever I left the tab. So I opened Chrome's devtools, went to the AI tab ad exposed my complaint. In a few seconds it had analysed all the minified sources of the website, found which tracker was responsible of this, and written a script to disable it. Lovely.
That in itself might be a social commentary.. :)
Sure, if you have an IQ of 80.
For people with IQ over 80, highlighting that people in different tribes are actually alike doesn't count as social commentary?
The only people who think republicans and democrats are exactly the same have an IQ of 80.
The "both sides" meme was funny when jon stewart was doing it in 2008. It has run its course.
I took it as a comment about voters than parties.
It didn't even occur to me that it was saying republicans and democrats are the same. That's just ridiculous ;-)
Edit: To clarify there's good evidence that people overestimate the degree to which people on the other side of the political divide hold extreme views by about a factor of two. We genuinely are less different than we think. It's not necessary for people to be the same for this to be true.
> To clarify there's good evidence that people overestimate the degree to which people on the other side of the political divide hold extreme views by about a factor of two.
Where can I read more about that evidence?
Because ~70 million of my countrymen have voted for a convicted rapist.
https://www.moreincommon.com/media/0fmblxb3/the-perception-g...
> On average, Democrats and Republicans believe that 55 percent of their opponents' views are extreme, but in reality only about 30 percent are.
If accurate, I'd say "only about 30%" of each side having extreme views is quite concerning, regardless of anyone's perceptions.
Real differences in policy still matter:
https://isps.yale.edu/news/2026-09-09-political-polarization...
The range of opinions is probably healthier than homogeneity. I think labelling people extremists and pushing them towards the centre would be pretty dystopian.
What is easier to change than people's opinions, is the two party political system which tends to resolve such questions to one of the two extremes based on one side achieving a tiny majority, rather than to the average which is usually a lot more sensible.
That's exactly how you look like to the rest of the world boy
Surely you agree that "both sides" think the other side is full of evil politicians that want to destroy the country AND their voters are complete morons?
And surely you can agree that each side has key issues they feel very strongly about (abortion on the left, guns on the right) and again, think the other side's view on said issues are utterly disgusting, right?
And SURELY you can agree that gerrymandering has occurred at various times in the past, from both sides, can't you? For example, take a look at the map of Illinois congressional districts[0]. Perfectly sensible districts here, yessir!
The low IQ take is pretending there aren't places where both sides do in fact behave the same way.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois%27s_congressional_dis...
What you'd expect to see in a healthy democracy is people who want to fix the bug, and for a while maybe those who most benefit from the bug fight to keep it but eventually there's a broad public sentiment in favour of fixing the bug and so it simply becomes uncontroversial to fix it. Say fifty years. Give it an extra generation if e.g. civil war breaks out interrupting such considerations.
But Gerry died in the nineteenth century. This practice is almost as old as the United States of America itself. I would say it's as bad as if the US still had slavery, or still had capital punishment, but oh yeah it still has both of those too. Do better.
We still have slavery?
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Inmates are frequently forced to work for pennies.
Yup. Quoting Wikipedia: "The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude except as a punishment for a crime where the individual has been convicted"
Mandatory "Penal labour" isn't chattel slavery but it would still be recognised as slavery in any modern understanding.
I love daily games. https://maptap.gg/ is my personal favorite! I love the author's little notes and asides as he discusses fun facts from around the world.
Thank you on the behalf of my kids who are Worldle regulars and can now diversify :)
(would appreciate more geo games)
try the geo games here: https://wordle.global/en/globle
there's a few
enclose.horse was sold off not too long after it was published. The new owners now seem to be doing a shameless cash grab, ripping off gerrymandle.com 1:1, down to some particularly weird UI choices, and the text copy is transparently LLM-generated. It would be one thing if they added some kind of improvement or unique take, but reskinning (with assets you bought) and throwing ads on it is, frankly, just lame.
To whom was it sold? Any reference for that?
I still thought it was some single persons product.
Update; ah ok sold to two people, not some huge company - https://enclose.horse/about-us:
---- Our Story
Enclose.horse was originally created by Shivers as an interesting optimization problem, the kind of thing you'd find in a Leetcode challenge or an Advent of Code puzzle. But after prototyping it, it turned out to be genuinely fun to play, and it grew into a fully-fledged game.
Today, enclose.horse is developed and maintained by Ryan and Praveen. We're constantly adding new features, puzzle mechanics, and quality-of-life improvements based on community feedback. If you have ideas, we'd love to hear them!
The LLM text copy really grinds my gears. It's really not hard to write your own copy. Using LLM copy is disrespectful to your users and tells me you don't give a crap about the quality of what you're publishing.
> ripping off gerrymandle.com
I'm used to game developers sometimes displaying their political preferences through their art, but I have to say that Gerrymandle's "Win the election for orange." is still quite on the nose!
For the record, it's just the current puzzle - the colors vary pretty wildly, see for example the previous one: https://gerrymandle.com/game/2026-10-29
There's also a colorblind mode where you can always win the election for blue, if that's more to your political preference! I like that mode just for keeping the colors consistent.
"Win the election for <color>" is Gerrymandle's standard text, and the color changes for each daily puzzle.
https://elect.horse/tutorial is a better starting point
Competitve side is much weaker than in enclose.horse, this game only measures hints used.
That's a really concrete demonstration of gerrymandering. Assign it in schools!
It doesn't represent the risk to gerrymandering at all. There are no error bars in voting patterns based on 4 year old data.
Part of the reason this next cycle is looking so bad for Republicans is _because_ of the gerrymandering they tried backfiring on them because they cut the lines too close to try and gain more seats.
Meant to post this, too.
Another great game from the enclose.horse game, both are very fun and really challenging to play depending on the level.
No idea what is this about. Filled land with hay and still lost.
A fairly basic game; my 9-year-old son has fun with it.
I honestly don't get today's expert puzzle. When you start, horse is at 8, donkey is at 10, and cow is at 14. I get two districts for horse, which the puzzle then states "horse wins," but wouldn't the final standing then be
horse: 10, donkey: 10, cow: 14
So cow still wins? Why did it say horse wins on the "See results" screen?
Each district you draw is the only thing that counts for voting.
So, "gerrymandering" the districts to make it so the least popular "party" wins is the objective of the game. What's maybe not clear about the game is that each dot represents one animal and not say another mini district.
the numbers are just the number of hexes for each candidate, what you care about are the number of colored areas / colored squares. If you see 2 or more blue colored squares above the buttons, then the horse wins, which is what you want.
Oh ok. I thought that was the number they were ahead by. So if I was down 8 to 14, I'd have to gerrymander 7 district wins to beat the cow. It makes sense they were the count of the dots.
because erect.horse does not exist... yet...
Extremely rude to use such similar colors for this, I can't fuckin tell what I'm doing
is this supposed to hard, because it was. and i don't know how i feel about that
Awesome! Adding to my collection at dles.gg
day 8 expert took me about 40 seconds
Big fan of enclose.horse. Happy there is a sequel
ZERO idea of what I'm supposed to do.
Look up gerrymandering. Also, there's a tutorial.
Obvious htmx propaganda.
This was incredibly fun and rewarding, I spent a really long time on the expert puzzle and eventually solved it. I really like that you can use some kinds of deductive logic, as well as trial and error as well! Very very fun.
Fun game!
“A tie wins a district for nobody”
I hate this AI slop text
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It'S a TwO pArTy SyStEm!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7l9QmtiXHU