enclose.horse | Hacker News Reader

enclose.horse

1,217 pointsDavidSJ233 comments

Great game, I love it! I hope the author is collecting juicy analytics. They would be useful if they ever want to bundle 100 levels in order of difficulty and release this as a Steam game (which I would absolutely buy!)

I don’t think the gates should animate up into the air. It breaks the visual logic of 2D for no benefit. It’s subconsciously confusing to see a gate I place in one cell move to occupy pixels in the cell “above” it.

I look forward to future days introducing new mechanics as well. Can I suggest a few, based on dynamics?

- Food! The horse moves on every turn towards an attractor. Have a hay bale / giant sugar cube in one corner fall off the back of a truck / helicopter :) Horses start out dumb and move directly towards the goal before backtracking. Smarter horses path find the shortest route to the goal.

- Goals! Now that the horse is moving, get the horse into a static horse box / cattle pen cell by strategically placing fences so that the path it takes towards the food involves walking onto the goal square.

- Floods! Water encroaches from the edges on a turn by turn basis. Not only do you have to contain the horse, you also have to hold back the flood.

> I don’t think the gates should animate up into the air.

I think it should go up, otherwise it doesn't look like a wall. It would look like something the horse can step on and run over. For the water it makes sense to be flat flat and that the horse doesn't want to touch it: it is water-shy.

To me the current design doesn't look like anything at all. I don't see a gate or a wall, just two rectangles.

+1 to this. It's also visually confusing, the gate looks like it's covering two cells.

Great game! Feature request: add a button that shows my submitted solution. I'd like to be able to compare it with the optimal solution (so it'd be nice if a single tap could toggle between my submission and the optimal).

It would be nice if the “optimal” view visualized both my solution and the optimal one at the same time, like a Venn diagram.

Just added this, check out "Optimal as overlay" in the settings.

It also conceals the cherries when it’s on the field below them.

> I don’t think the gates should animate up into the air.

I agree! It feels off compared to the overall aesthetic of the game.

Awesome game though! Loved it.

IMO, the game is great to keep simple, but I’d like to play more levels than just daily, so could see people paying for the ability to play more, like NYT games, and could be part of a suite of game if curated daily by expert vs social curation. The blocks are small though for a small phone with big fingers.

I also wonder if making it GPL and submitting to various *NIX distros would be best. Then it may need to be standalone with random maps created by ML or similar.

It has a very pleasant editor to make + share custom maps, e.g. https://enclose.horse/play/a3OGcW

You can play the previous days and hundreds of user contributed maps! Check out the menu. Enjoy :)

Ah I did not see the menu at all

Another thing to try could be to rank people in realtime instead of the one-off submission approach. I do this in https://spaceword.org (create tight crosswords using 21 letters), and I think it's quite motivating to see how you compare to others as you improve your solution. On the other hand, its a bit more taxing on the server, and then you also could not show the optimal solution.

Cool game! One minor feature request. It would be helpful to have some way to move the entire block of placed tiles around at once to give myself more room in a particular direction.

Thank you! :) If you click the three dots on the left top side of the letters area, you can shift all tiles in a direction.

I would prefer not being distracted by that, and not having information on possible solutions before submitting. Trying to find the best solution with added hints like that is a different game. So it should be opt-in.

> I hope the author is collecting juicy analytics.

I hope they're not. Can't we have a few things in this world that are just fun without going and sticking surveillance on them?

if the analytics lead to an actual game on steam im down

You could just package an arbitrary 100 levels, let the player play them in any order, then give rewards for 10, 20, 30, 40, etc. levels completed/mastered.

This would still benefit from a difficulty rating system or order

Or go full on kaizo Mario and make it a random room out of the 100

naw im looking to have fun, not cry

something in me loves progressively harder levels

Collecting analytics like this is effectively the same as play-testing physical board games in-development. People play a game, information is gathered, and the game is tuned in response to that. If zero information were ever gathered, games could not be balanced or tuned for other things like unforeseen problems.

Please, show me a piece of software, or game, that is perfect the first time it is made.

It's effectively the same, except people volunteer or are paid to play test.

This whole industry really needs a lesson on consent.

So long as personal information is not collected, consent is not morally necessary.

If I collect information on how often a coin-op Street Fighter II game is played in an arcade, while collecting no personal information, consent is not needed.

Because using someone else's hardware in a public space is clearly equivalent to using your own hardware in the privacy of your own home.

This is software coming from a server, not hardware. It doesn't matter which device it's run on, or whether it's in your home or not.

You are not entitled to play the game, which is hosted on their server which requires bandwidth and other resources. In the same way that you are free to make demands about how software runs on your machine, the author is free to make demands about the use of their software.

If the data gathered is only on gameplay, and not something that can be used as PII like IP addresses or device information, then it should be fine. Gathering things like the score and time spent completing the level, isn't a problem. This could be used to rank the levels, without gathering any user information.

If gathering the data should be fine, then asking for permission should also be fine.

There are games that let you opt-out, hell even ones that ask you when you first open the game. There are bad apples, but there are plenty of good ones too.

I think the argument is that they shouldn't be opt-out, but opt-in.

If I want to play a game and provide my feedback, the default should be that that doesn't happen unless I explicitly say it should.

Opt-out means that, by default, you're collecting metrics from my plays, until I find the means to opt-out.

If the game asks you when you first open it, does it matter if the question is to "opt out" or "opt in"?

If it asks you then it's neither opt-in nor opt-out. Then it depends on how it asks you. If it's a simple yes/no, it's fine. If it's typical tech bullshit where your options are a big "I want to make the world a better place and save the whales by sending my data" or a tiny button in the corner labeled "maybe later" that takes you to another screen saying "please confirm you want to opt out of data collection and kill a bunch of kittens" then not so good.

Indie games don’t have a budget for playtesting, but they can probably swing a GA account.

'analytics' and 'surveillance' are not the same thing

trying to understand player behavior in the context of a board or video game (though there is some overlap!) is not the same as trying to understand user behavior in the context of social media or purchasing behavior - the data of both of which derive their value from being sold to THIRD PARTIES as a commodity.

being able to tune a fun little video game is not the same thing at all

Does your opinion change if they use it to train a commercial program to do a similar task?

For me at least, no. Making money by training a model from user data on such a game seems like a perfectly fine thing to do.

yeah man what a horrible world we live in man. thats so profound of you to say, truly. well said man

Sometimes simple things are best. I really like the game as-is.

This is a rather simple game to program. IMO, if you can program, take a few weekends to make your own game based on your ideas. If you can't program, your ideas will lead you to a wonderful learning project.

> I don’t think the gates should animate up into the air. It breaks the visual logic of 2D for no benefit. It’s subconsciously confusing to see a gate I place in one cell move to occupy pixels in the cell “above” it.

I interpreted it as standard "top-down" RPG graphics, where the Y axis always doubles as the Z axis. As such, I didn't find it visually confusing - but it did made playing on mobile annoying, because you often end up targeting the wrong field.

And of course: Buy additional walls using in-game purchases!

(jk)

There is definitely a turn-based minigame here - get the most "distance" travelled by the horse, every turn the horse moves one block towards it's closest escape and you can drop walls to cause it to find a new path - in this one you actually lose when the horse can't get out but the goal is to get the horse to move as many blocks as possible using your limited number of walls (or apples which can attract it).

I was initially expecting the horse to move after each turn. As it is, this is a logic game, similar to what I'd expect to see in the NYT Games app. Quite entertaining, but something that you could look at and reason about to solve.

But, you absolutely could make this a turn based game where the horse is trying to escape and you (playing as the farmer), work to fence it in as it meanders towards a gate.

That reminds me of Paquerette Down the Bunburrows [1] which is a very fun pathfinding game where the bunnies will pathfind to try to run away from you. It's not exactly what you described, but it is very fun and surprisingly deep and challenging.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1628610/Paquerette_Down_t...

The turn-based version sounds interesting, but I think it falls on its face in practice. The game then becomes:

1. lure the horse to an optimal point on the map.

2. trap it in a small circle of fences.

3. build part of your final wall with the remaining fences.

4. one by one, move the fences trapping the horse in place into position.

Great game, I returned back to play next day.

> I don’t think the gates should animate up into the air. It breaks the visual logic of 2D for no benefit.

I also feel it would make more sense either for everything to be 2.5D or pure top down. Having appear / disappear animation is nice feedback to user though.

Other thing is that maybe the hitbox should change when the wall comes up. Now to remove it you need to press the grid, essentially the root of the wall. Unintuitive to me.

Thanks for the game, looking forward to when there is multiple horses or sheep to enclose.

Thanks for the feedback!

I would have responded earlier, but I wanted to actually implement something you suggested: different walls. Alternative wall sprites, which don't occlude other tiles so much, are now live and can be adjusted in the settings.

Re: analytics, the only serious plans I had were to use the daily level histograms to adjust difficulty. The idea of taking some levels and releasing them as a standalone game is tempting, but I wonder if doing this type of puzzle over and over again might get tedious? That's one of the reasons I thought it would work better as a daily game. Let's see how it's doing in a few months.

I love the mechanic ideas. I think there are two big constraints on what kind of cool new features/gimmicks can be implemented though. First: if this is going to be a daily game, the new mechanics have to be intuitive enough to where somebody could figure them out their first time playing. I like the idea of cherries being misleading, and it's a fun troll-ish idea for a single player game, but it would be a mean trick if it were someone's first daily. (Then again, there's someone who's first Wordle game was probably MYRRH.) The other constraint is I have a solver that can guarantee the optimal solution is actually optimal. Some game mechanics might make this a lot harder, or even impossible.

Great game. I've been having fun with it every day, but today there is no puzzle! Be careful about this. I intuit that not having a puzzle on a day is enough to lose some players, with the number only increasing the more days you don't have puzzles. Not sure how you're doing it now, but you should easily be able to generate thousands of levels and have them all ready in the page like wordle.

I found the optimal solution for day 8 by hand, that was fun!

My algorithm, by hand, was as such:

1. Start with the smallest possible valid solution (1)

2. Expand slowly, and each "step" (like, moving a wall or two around to "obvious" spaces) must be a valid solution (this brings you to 40-60 score, depending on your choices, on day 8). Continue to step 3 once you can't see anything obvious.

3. Look at possible places where you could expand, but need 1 more block. You'll find one eventually.

4. See if you can spare any walls anywhere, using diagonals for example. If so, place the solution from 3 and go to 3 (repeat). If not, go to 5.

5. Count or estimate the squares gained by doing your improvement from 3. See if you can reduce your score by less than that, pessimizing your solution, to gain 1 wall. Once you've found one, go to 3.

That got me to the optimal score within 15 mins or so.

I found the same algorithm! The top down solution didn't really work.

Very fun game

This feels strangely similar to TDD with the Tranformation Priority Premise

I think you should change the cherries to a battery and call the game Correct Horse Battery Stable.

That is just delightful.

Reference[1] for anyone wondering.

[1] https://xkcd.com/936/

Or the cherries could be a delicious pastry or PBJ-like treat: _Collect Horse Buttery Stable_...

Use staples instead of walls as barriers.

Or turn the cherries into sugar lumps, and call the game My Lovely Horse

This is nice, I enjoyed it. Was a couple points off the optimal score for day 8 but when I clicked "Show optimal" I couldn't then go back to see mine to compare. Either way, stretched the brain a bit.

Only nit: fix the walls. They take up one and a half spaces so are confusing, and they're sci-fi steel with flashing red lights. Turn them into one-square-only fences. You use fences to enclose horses, not raptor walls from Jurassic Park.

I mean, the horse does sometimes talk about the demon god if you click on it, so who knows...

Yeah, it needs to add a toggle button to let you switch between yours and optimal quickly.

I did figure out that you can get back to yours by going through the past-days menu though.

This is my feedback too. Turn “show optimal” into a toggle that persists on the page and toggles between yours and the optimal.

And same about the walls. Especially on mobile it’s hard enough to tap the right square, and having a wall poking up from the square below just makes things worse.

But overall I love the game!

Thanks for the feedback! And there's now one-square-only fences you can turn on in the settings.

Score init should say N/EIGH instead of N/A, otherwise great.

Reminds me of a comic I saw a couple years back about a horse parliament where the horses only voted “neigh”

That's from the Far Side. My mom has had this on her fridge for at least 30 years.

This appears to be it. :)

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/4f/51/e0/4f51e04263a89a008e29668b7...

dead. how in the world does a thought like that come into your mind. i feel like i got 0 in creativity

I am curious on how you would algorithmically find the optimal solution for this kind of problem for much bigger grids. I wanted to do some seed finding in Factorio for the same exact problem using the generated map images, but never found a good solution that was fast enough.

Constraint programming seems to be a fitting approach. Input would be number of walls, and the location of lakes. The decision variables would be the positions of walls. In order to encode the horse being enclosed, additional variables for whether horse can reach a given square can be given. Finally, constraints for reachability and that edges cannot be reached should ensure correctness.

Yes. CP SAT crunches through it in no time, but of course larger grids would quickly make it take much longer.

See

https://gist.github.com/Macuyiko/86299dc120478fdff529cab386f...

I don't believe this works in general. If you have a set of tiles that connect to neither the horse nor to an exit, they can still keep each other reachable in this formulation.

Yes, this is the major challenge with solving them with SAT. You can make your solver check and reject these horseless pockets (incrementally rejecting solutions with new clauses), which might be the easiest method, since you might need iteration for maximizing anyways (bare SAT doesn't do "maximize"). To correctly track the flood-fill flow from the horse, you generally need a constraint like reachable(x,y,t) = reachable(nx,ny,t-1) ^ walkable(x,y), and reachable(x,y,0)=is_horse_cell, which adds N^2 additional variables to each cell.

You can more precisely track flows and do maximization with ILP, but that often loses conflict-driven clause learning advantages.

Good point. I don't think the puzzles do this and if they would, I would run a pre-solve pass over the puzzle first to flood fill such horseless pockets up with water, no?

It's not quite that easy. For the simplest example, look at https://enclose.horse/play/dlctud, where the naive solution will waste two walls to fence in the large area. Obviously, you can construct puzzles that have lots of these "bait" areas.

Like the other comment suggested, running a loop where you keep adding constraints that eliminate invalid solutions will probably work for any puzzle that a human would want to solve.

Oh I see what you mean now, indeed:

    Score: 7
    ~~~~~~
    ~····~
    ~·~~·~
    .#..#.
    ......
    ..#...
    .#H#..
    ..#...

However, I think that you do not need 'time' based variables in the form of

    reachable(x,y,t) = reachable(nx,ny,t-1)

Enforcing connectivity through single-commodity flows is IMO better to enforce flood fill (also introduces additional variables but is typically easier to solve with CP heuristics):

    Score: 2
    ~~~~~~
    ~....~
    ~.~~.~
    ......
    ......
    ..##..
    .#H·#.
    ..##..

Cool puzzle!

MILP solver: https://github.com/dyigitpolat/enclose-horse-solver/blob/mai...

try at: https://dyigitpolat.github.io/enclose-horse-solver/

it was very easy to support the portal mechanism when the entire problem is mapped as a network flow optimization. i could just simply add the portal coordinates together with the neighbors.

The site uses Answer Set Programming with the Clingo engine to compute the optimal solutions for smaller grids. Maximizing grids like this is probably NP-hard.

Note that traditional SAT and SMT solvers are quite inefficient at computing flood-fills.

The ASP specifications it uses to compute optimal solutions are surprisingly short and readable, and look like:

  #const budget=11.
  horse(4,4).
  cell(0,0).
  boundary(0,0).
  cell(0,1).
  boundary(0,1).
  % ...truncated for brevity...
  cell(3,1).
  water(3,1).
  % ...
  
  % Adjacent cells (4-way connectivity)
  adj(R,C, R+1,C) :- cell(R,C), cell(R+1,C).
  adj(R,C, R-1,C) :- cell(R,C), cell(R-1,C).
  adj(R,C, R,C+1) :- cell(R,C), cell(R,C+1).
  adj(R,C, R,C-1) :- cell(R,C), cell(R,C-1).
  
  % Walkable = not water
  walkable(R,C) :- cell(R,C), not water(R,C).
  
  % Choice: place wall on any walkable cell except horse and cherries
  { wall(R,C) } :- walkable(R,C), not horse(R,C), not cherry(R,C).
  
  % Budget constraint (native counting - no bit-blasting!)
  :- #count { R,C : wall(R,C) } > budget.
  
  % Reachability from horse (z = enclosed/reachable cells)
  z(R,C) :- horse(R,C).
  z(R2,C2) :- z(R1,C1), adj(R1,C1, R2,C2), walkable(R2,C2), not wall(  R2,C2).
  
  % Horse cannot reach boundary (would escape)
  :- z(R,C), boundary(R,C).
  
  % Maximize enclosed area (cherries worth +3 bonus = 4 total)
  #maximize { 4,R,C : z(R,C), cherry(R,C) ; 1,R,C : z(R,C), not cherry(  R,C) }.
  
  % Only output wall positions
  #show wall/2.

Nice, you don't see clingo mentioned often. We use it in the Spack package manager for resolving dependencies [1]

[1] https://github.com/spack/spack/blob/develop/lib/spack/spack/...

Im over 35 years of age. I have 15+ years of programming experience. And I generally consider myself as someone who has good breadth of tech in general. Yet, this is the first time in my life I've heard of ASP. And gosh. I was completely blown away by this as I read more about it and went through some examples (https://github.com/domoritz/clingo-wasm/blob/main/examples/e...)

Therefore, like a good little llm bitch that I have become recently, I straight away went to chatgpt/sonnet/gemini and asked them to compile me a list of more such "whatever this is known as". And holy cow!! This is a whole new world.

My ask to HN community: any good book recommendations related to "such stuff"? Not those research kinds as I don't have enough brain cells for it. But, a little easier and practical ones?

Thanks..

Has to be my favourite comment, haha!

The pre-machine-learning formulations of AI focused on symbolic reasoning through the dual problems of search and logic. Many problems can be reduced to enumerating legal steps, and SAT/SMT/ASP and related systems can churn through those in a highly optimized and genetic manner.

Thanks... noted a few keywords to expand on further:

1. Symbolic reasoning

2. SAT/SMT/ASP

3. pre-machine-learning formulations of AI

"Logic programming"[0] is what I've always heard this stuff called. I was introduced to it with Prolog.

"Declarative programming"[1] is kind of a superset of logic programming, which may or may not be the aspect that piques your interest.

"Constraint programming"[2] and "Constraint logic programming"[3] are also a perspective on it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_programming

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declarative_programming

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constraint_programming

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constraint_logic_programming

Thanks a lot. These are what I was hoping to know.

The more recent Lifschitz book is the easiest to learn from IMO:

- https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~vl/teaching/378/ASP.pdf

It starts with basics of using ASP and gives examples in clingo, not math.

The Potassco book is more comprehensive and will help you understand better what is going on:

- https://potassco.org/book/

Things I don't like include that it's more dense, doesn't use clingo examples (mostly math-style examples so you kind of have to translate them in your head), and while the proofs of how grounding works are interesting, the explanations are kind of short and don't always have the intuition I want.

I still think this is the authoritative reference.

The "how to build your own ASP system" paper is a good breakdown of how to integrate ASP into other projects:

- https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.06692

The Potassco folks are doing amazing work maintaining these tools. I also wish more people knew about them.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that specifically for games stuff like enclose.horse, look at Adam Smith's Applied ASP Course from UCSC:

- https://canvas.ucsc.edu/courses/1338

Forgot to mention that one... we use clingo in Spack for dependency solving and other applications frequently slip my mind.

Thank you.. Have noted these down.

I think it's NP hard, maybe from Sparsest Cut. But you could probably find the min-cut and then iterate by adding capacity on edges in the min cut until you find a cut of the right size. (if the desired cut-size is close to the min cut size at least).

It's NP-hard from Minimum s–t Cut with at least k Vertices. That's the edge version, but since the grid graph is 4-regular(-ish), the problem is trivially convertible to the vertex version.

Edit: apex-4-regular

That conclusion may be too hasty. If min cut with k vertices is NP-hard on arbitrary graphs, that doesn't automatically mean that that applies to a 2D grid too.

Is NP hardness proven for just planar graphs? Those are closer to the 2D grid, but still slightly more general. All I could find was a reduction to densest k subgraphs, but Wikipedia tells me that whether that problem is NP hard for planar graphs is an open question.

To be clear, I would be very surprised if the problem turns out to be _not_ NP hard, but there is no trivial equivalence to min cut in general graphs to show that it is.

I agree, that is a good point. Although it is (induced) subgraphs of 2D grids, which gets you a bit closer to the planar case (albeit with bounded degree).

It might be polytime on planar graphs, but that would be surprising.

Also I don't think the equivalence between edge/vertex versions is trivial at all (though maybe we just have different standards of triviality).

For example, in a grid like this:

    ..####
    .....#
    #.#..#
    #...H#
    ######

A single wall placed (i.e. vertex removed) can block two edges, and it's not obvious what graph transformation can turn that into a single edge.

You transform it into the directed case and then you turn each vertex into an arc.

There is a standard construction for going between vertex and edge cuts.

I think there should be some graph algorithm for this, to find a bottleneck in a graph

> algorithmically find the optimal solution for this kind of problem for much bigger grids.

Great, now I've been double nerd-sniped - once for the thing itself and another for 'What would an optimiser for this look like? Graph cuts? SAT/SMT? [AC]SP?'

I'd bet it's NP-hard. The standard reduction to a flow problem only tells you if a cut exists (by min-cut max-flow duality), but here we want the cut of size at most N that maximizes enclosed area.

The Leetcode version of this is "find articulation points", which is just a DFS, but it's less general than what is presented here.

There's probably an FPT algorithm using important separators (4^k).

Someone asked about this very problem here:

https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/176005/how-to-remove-...

I would like to be able to compare/switch optimal with my solution with single click.

Side by side or a diff view would be great.

I agree. Also, knowing the max score in advance would be better, so you know when to stop/whether to keep going.

I'm happy not knowing myself but the answer can be found easily in DevTools. All the max scores are there (for current and previous days only).

that gives away too much information, instead i'd go with something that tells you that you've found the best solution. you'll still be able to know whether or not to keep going, but you get no information that makes finding the ideal solution easier.

Happy to see there's now a toggle between "your solution" and "optimal" once you've submitted. Makes it much easier to see what you missed.

Same.

I took a screenshot of my solution and the optimal one - and then I could compare like this.

This is now implemented on daily levels! Click the link below your score after submission.

Thanks for the pleasant experience of providing a feedback loop for my suggestion, felt rewarding and the implementation works nicely.

lovely, I've created a solution finder for it.

1. Do a screenshot of the grid (try to include walls as well)

2. Open https://enclosure-horse-solution.onrender.com/

3. Make sure the number of walls are correct in the input (bottom left)

4. Press "Solve"

PS: It might crash as it's on the free version of render. I've added a caching layer.

Here's the github so you can run it locally:

https://github.com/langarus/enclosure.horse-solution

clone it and run

make init // make web

I see some of you are already crashing the server. :melting: try to run it locally if you can't get the result via render

You caching in memory or disk? Redis or db might survive the crashes and reduce future ones

on disk, so basically I'm trying to save the image of a solution and reuse it if the same quiz is required. So instead of recomputing the result just return the same image.

Got it. Is that cache surviving the crashes?

I'd have to host it somewhere (s3?). Right now I only commit the solution png to github. OFC it's not a good option but it's free and fast.

I think Cloudflare r2 has a generous free tier. You can also technically store images in redis I think. anyways, thank you for making this, really cool!

curious question from a non-programmer - are you checking against the exact same image (i.e. hashed), or is there an easy way of trying to match an image to a very similar one you've seen before?

Not OP, so I don't know what their website does, but there is a technique called "locality-sensitive hashing" that gives the same hash for similar items instead of exactly the same ones

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locality-sensitive_hashing

There is a level editor with the ability to show the optimal result for a custom level. In theory, one could recreate any official level and reveal the best solution that way. However, I haven't tried this to verify any intentional roadblocks by the developer.

Each time I see a `horse` domain, particularly for entertainment, I remember to `traceroute bad.horse` and smile again.

lmao, this is beautiful

Hi, I only made an account to comment on this. First and foremost I love it, thank you! Second, I would love to know the maximum achievable score each day! so I don’t feel like I have to spend an infinite amount of time with it, just to make sure that my solution is the ideal. Sometimes I might already have the optimal solutions, but I still have to make sure to find the other worse ideas, just to be sure.

I did Day 8 - I don't know if Perfect means I got the most optimal score, I do show up at the top of the graph.

https://enclose.horse Day 8 PERFECT! 100%

If you click on "View Optimal", it shows you the optimal solution which should be identical[0] to yours for "Perfect".

[0] I'm assuming, possibly quite wrongly, that there's only one optimal solution per day.

I don’t see any View Optimal button. Is it present in Mobile ?

I don't see this button either (desktop) but searching the HTML gives a <script> that says

  window.__LEVEL__ = null; window.__DAILY_MODE__ = true; window.__DAILY_LEVELS__ = [{"id":"FswXDo","date":"2026-01-06","dayNumber":8,"optimalScore":86},{"id":"6UV4Yw","date":"2026-01-05","dayNumber":7,"optimalScore":95},{"id":"VfWi_1","date":"2026-01-04","dayNumber":6,"optimalScore":77},{"id":"CNtGPI","date":"2026-01-03","dayNumber":5,"optimalScore":116},{"id":"tnLvlG","date":"2026-01-02","dayNumber":4,"optimalScore":51},{"id":"Qn9vLs","date":"2026-01-01","dayNumber":3,"optimalScore":74},{"id":"Kj7mXp","date":"2025-12-31","dayNumber":2,"optimalScore":90},{"id":"E03KkY","date":"2025-12-30","dayNumber":1,"optimalScore":68}];

EDIT: the view optimal button appears after submission

Results, then scroll down a tiny bit.

Hi, First and foremost I love it, thank you! Second, I would love to know the maximum achievable score each day! so I don’t feel like I have to spend an infinite amount of time with it, jut to make sure that my solution is the ideal. Sometimes I might already have the optimal solutions, but I still have to make sure to find the other worse ideas, just to be sure.

Which came first -- the game or the domain name?

i have soooo many domains i’ve paid for for years that will now get sites because of the fact i can code at 10x+ now.

i like how this was mildly downvoted for some reason

Generally the idea of the game, then the domain name, then the game.

I imagine you went searching for domain names and came up with this? I resisted clicking on this top story all day because I thought "how good could that be? "enclose horse" what is that?" Yet, the experience was genuine-slow-forming-smile-of-understanding. This is really good.

Cool game, but I don't like how you get only one chance. Even returning to the page, you can't try again to beat your previous score. No replayability value at all.

I disagree about the replayability aspect. It‘s a daily challenge, so come back tomorrow. I quite like it.

I seriously don't get the idea behind daily challenges unless you want to keep users hooked to extract some value from them, but that doesn't seem to be the case here, as there are no ads.

Just show all the different levels at once.

That's fine. So these kind of games aren't for you, then. Remember crosswords in newspapers? Yeah, think of it like that. You don't get hooked until you cannot let go, you get a limited chunk served each day. Same with Wordle.

I remember buying a magazine full of crosswords and similar puzzles when I was in the mood.

And when there were sites with unlimited Wordle, I played a few in a row.

On the internet, unlike with newspapers, you're not limited to how many levels/games you can make per day. Making it once per day doesn't make any sense whatsoever. It's condescending to the users and feels like a power trip.

You can freely make levels and browse other people's levels. The complaining about power trips seems as uncharitable a perspective as you could possibly conceive of, not to mention a bit theatric.

so don’t? others have said they like it, you don’t, move on

> It's condescending to the users and feels like a power trip.

condescending (adjective): having or showing an attitude of patronizing superiority.

I don't really see how a once-a-day puzzle is condescending, unless it's a "You can't be trusted to regulate yourself so I'll do it for you" type thing. Adding a dictionary definition like above, however, probably is condescending :)

But I like the one-a-day format because, as other comments have said, you can spend an entire day with just one puzzle feeling important (relative to things that are important).

I assume that "all the different levels" might not exist yet. The author is probably creating them a bit in advance, and will keep going as long as they're motivated. Having a regular schedule for new releases helps, and doing it daily seems as sensible as any other schedule.

If you click the menu button in the top right you can play all the past puzzles

> you want to keep users hooked to extract some value from them

Ironically, that's what I initially liked about the daily puzzles like Wordle: they forcibly prevented you from sinking too much time into them. It was sort of like, "hey here's something cool, and I'm going to make sure it's a positive addition to your life by preventing you from succumbing to your own addictive impulses". You could call that condescending or infantilizing, but to me it's just part of the look and feel of a thing. Especially if the author isn't charging money, they get to use whatever tools are at their disposal to craft the users' experience of it. Wordle Over And Over Again is a different game than Wordle Once Daily. (And WOAOA done properly would probably have a progression of difficulties, or themes, or something, whereas WOD makes more sense with pure randomness.)

It shows you what the exit routes are, what your score will be, and you can move the gates around as long as you want, so the means of finding the maximum area are entirely within your grasp.

But you have no idea what the optimal solution is, are you 1,10,50 away from it. Would be nice to have some indicator of how close you are before you submit, though I guess that's intentional.

I believe that’s the point. I had the optimal solution for some time but was convinced there was something better. Eventually I submitted, and seeing the perfect score was more thrilling after convincing myself I was an idiot.

If it told you how close you were then you could just brute force your way to a perfect score every board by trying each square.

But if you remember the best score isn't that approach still possible?

bruh it’s like Wordle, come back tomorrow

You get one submit but you can press reset and find better solutions even though you can’t submit it to the leaderboard

Click the sandwich icon in the top right, then either Past Puzzles or Browse, and you can play more puzzles. (Or even create and submit your own.)

The one shot per day provides a reason to sink your teeth into one board.

I love Wordle but I found it unplayable when I used that Wordle archive site to play infinite games since there was no reason to think deeply about the 10th+ round I was playing in one sitting.

You can just test without submitting though?

You can just remove/change walls after having placed all. You see your current score, but can keep iterating.

Yes but it would be nice to see the targets, so you know how far off from an optimal solution you are. I know I'd spend more time looking for better solves if I knew the current one can be improved

Clear cookies?

IMO they should have a (second) pop-up that warns you that you only get one submit. Not sure if it should let you know if you've made an optimal solution or not, but since it's not timed there's no cost in slowing people down. I've seen similar daily puzzles where you get to see the leaderboard and then can go back and optimize further. Yes, it says it at the beginning, but it's still easy to forget.

Nice game! Out of curiosity, are the daily levels built by hand or algorithmically? Is there some way to measure their difficulty computationally, other than just trying to do it yourself or seeing how many people get a perfect score? I'm also working on a grid-based browser game and both those questions have come up for me, I'm keen to see how other people tackle it.

There is a built in map editor, click the hamburger menu.

All the daily levels are built by hand. I struggled to come up with a good random level generator. You can see my feeble attempts in the Edit page (via the hamburger menu) by giving the dice button a few sad clicks.

I did originally try to measure the difficulty computationally by running the solver and timing it, but it didn't really line up with what humans would find difficult. Now I'm just eyeballing it.

lots of fun! the fact that the walls spill over the square boundaries is very annoying though, i would love to have an option to just make a wall a filled in square without the 3d effect.

This is a very cool and enjoyable game. I'd be really interested in knowing what framework/library was used to make it. I inspected the source and can see the game is done on canvas, but can't work out more than that.

I wouldn't be surprised if they're just rawdogging the canvas API

The canvas API itself is pretty basic. It's not complicated at all to slap graphical tiles onto the screen.

Just vanilla canvas + Typescript.

Thank you for an interesting game! Is the code also available in a nicer-to-read way?

Looks like some people have discovered the first "accidental" game mechanic: The horse can walk over cherry fields, but the player cannot place walls on them - so if a level designer places cherries strategically, they can create unblockable paths.

Right now, this is only used for troll levels, but I wonder if you could also use it for some actual puzzles.

It's not just troll levels, see https://enclose.horse/play/n9YDZm

My 10 year old loves this game. He started playing it Wednesday or Thursday of last week and basically all of his screen time. Both trying to optimize and the level design scratch an itch that few games do

I think this problem is called the maximum-weight closure and can be solved as max flow. You want to find a cut between source (horse) so they were no out-going edges not in the cut (escape routes).

It's not the same problem. First, it's not directed, second it's a vertex separation problem.

Ah yes quite right.

Ton of fun! Was interesting to see how my strategy evolved as well. I started out trying to make a large pen, but quickly realized that wouldn't work, so I made a small pen and then started moving it out. This allowed me to see individual optimizations and try alternatives. Even at the end, about to hit submit, I wasn't sure my solution was optimal, but ended up with the optimal sizse-86 solution for today's challenge. Will try again tomorrow!

> Horses can't move diagonally or over water.

Ah the famous spherical horse in vacuum

This is surprisingly similar to a subset of the ARC II puzzles.

The collected answered could probably be used to teach an AI to approach this type of problem thereby gaining some of the cognitive biases that humans have, which is exactly what you want in some cases: An AI that generates human like solutions to hard problems .

I love it! I miss a way to see the reference solution, would be nice in order to learn. Or maybe get a hint.

Usability, i'd like either a 'save/restore state' button, or a 'restore current best'. Right now, experimenting after finding a solution seems like a punishment if I can't recall exactly what I did to hit my rolling 'best'. Good game though!

There is a button that restores your best, it's right under the current score.

I'm pretty sure the author got the domain first and then designed an (awesome) game around it.

just vibe-coded an optimizer for this game that takes in the screenshot of the grid and the number of walls as input, and spits out the optimal wall configuration (supports cherries too!)

algorithm:

1. infer grid dimensions

2. color histogram analysis to designate grasses, water, cherries and horse

3. apply mixed-integer linear programming to determine optimized wall placements

4. profit!

try: https://dyigitpolat.github.io/enclose-horse-solver

source: https://github.com/dyigitpolat/enclose-horse-solver

Love this! I feel like this would get a lot of traction as a mobile app. It's a perfect "I've got five minutes free" game.

Doesn't feel outrageously difficult to put inside a webview?

A very fun game - it took quite a bit of fiddling to get an optimal solution using an LLM. Interesting as I haven't tried using them for 'unique' algo problems much. And then the day 9 puzzle broke my original solver (I had bounded areas that were unreachable to the horse so didn't actually score). Will be interesting to see whether the solver works on day 10.

It would be interesting to be able to change the wall budget for each puzzle to add some variation (with a max limit).

Nice game, I'm going to sink some time on these! Got 86 points today

https://enclose.horse Day 8 PERFECT! 100%

Enjoyed that.

Removing a block was a bit fiddly on FireFox (Floorp) due to the right click menu appearing when I tried to click on a tile.

Looking forward to tomorrows!

I thought so too at first but you can just left click to remove the wall actually.

I expected the horse to move one tile for each block you placed. I had an elaborate plan to lure it towards one exit and then close it at the last minute... Nope!

I did see a game recently which did that (you place a tile, the animal moves a tile, etc.) - possibly on itch.io. I'll see if I can dig it out.

I remember a game I played on my phone ~15 years ago called "Greedy Spiders". The spiders would move greedily towards something every move, but you could cut strings in their web so they would have to start a new route. So you would kinda have to lure them into going one direction while slowly chipping away at the web, until you could completely cut them off or force them to have to take a longer detour giving you more time to cut more of the web. Quite challenging after a while.

There's an old Flash game called 'Chat Noir' where you have to trap a cat on a hexagonal grid. Here's a copy of it: https://www.hoodamath.com/games/chatnoir.html

Ah, yes, the one I played recently was basically that (except it was a horse, I think.)

A Windows 3.1 game called Rodent's Revenge: https://classicreload.com/win3x-rodents-revenge.html

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r6CnPzTXKE

Damn, the good old days when games didn't have loot boxes, ads, etc...

John Conway studied similar problems

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_problem

The game dynamic feels a bit like Wordle: One puzzle per day and different solutions that you can compare with others.

Does each day's challenge come out at a certain time in your local timezone? I have a friend who is seeing day 9 when I can only see day 8. I'd request having new daily maps come out at a consistent global time for the purpose of competing with friends who live in different timezones.

I tried to match what Wordle does, so it should come out midnight in your local timezone.

Raaarhh. Perfect solution yesterday, perfect solution today! I'm really on a roll. Love love the game

Fun game, but the animation style is too distracting for me. Maybe there should be an option to disable it or have it stop automatically.

I didn't initially expect it would be a problem, but the constant squiggly movement gets very annoying.

I love this! Would you consider adding a settle to toggle the animations off? When I'm staring at it to figure it out the animations are a bit distracting!

Nice puzzle! But I'd like a button to go back to your most optimal solution so far: it's tedious to try other options but then have to convert it back to your better solution again...

There is one! Or maybe dev is just that fast. Tap where it says “Best: 67” and it reverts to previous best.

Say that again

Fantastic fun! My humble level contribution is here [1].

[1] https://enclose.horse/play/44wCCO

Great little game. For the community levels, I'd suggest adding filters based on size & walls.

I'd even go so far as to deny any submission with more than sqrt(size) walls.

I didn't realize level 1 gave me 11 (eleven) walls at first. I thought it stood for II = roman 2. Maybe use a font that makes the difference between 1 and I clearer.

Wow, that’s a lot more challenging than it looks. I agree with another commenter that the 3d blocks look confusing - they appear to cover two spaces.

Wife’s comment: “Cherries? It needs to be an apple.”

https://enclose.horse Day 8 PERFECT! 100%

Very cool game. Immediately reminded me of pathery, which I can also recommend to everyone who enjoys this.

Is there guaranteed to be a solution that encloses the cherry? Is Day 8 the first day to have a cherry?

So far, I haven't had the heart to deceive people with red cherrings. All levels with cherries use at least some of them in the solution.

A good game. Possibly the 2048 of 2026.

Nice game! I could only play one game but wish I could play previous days' games as well

You can. Checkout the Past Puzzles in the menu (top-right).

Seeing tile animations immediately reminded me of Godzilla 2: War of the Monsters on NES.

Very enjoyable work pastime!

Great stuff :)

This is a really fun game. And I just realised you can make your own levels!

A nice easter egg - click on a horse, when enclosed, on mobile

So fun!

I wonder how the wiggle animation is implemented in for the buttons and modal.

It's like ChuChu Rocket! + JezzBall; two of my favorite games!

Such a good game and execution. Thank you

Looking forward to the AI enabled subscription version

I want a tool that visualizes code paths in this way

I dont understand what is the goal of this game

Enclose the horse. Horse likes most space.

Nice. Reminds me of Rodent's Revenge.

I enjoyed it, thanks for making it!

Happy Year of the Horse!

Leetcode problem

Great game

Very fun

Raaarrrhh. Perfect solution yesterday, perfect solution today! I'm really on a roll lmao. Love it

Which AI am I training here?

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