enclose.horse

https://enclose.horse/

by DavidSJ • 7 months ago

1217 233 7 months ago

enclose.horse

lukebechtel• 7 months ago

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

sneak• 7 months ago

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.

cdelsolar• 7 months ago

i like how this was mildly downvoted for some reason

hk__2• 7 months ago

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

divbzero• 7 months ago

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

roskelld2• 7 months ago

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!

porphyra• 7 months ago

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

savolai2• 7 months ago

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

zimpenfish5• 7 months ago

Side by side or a diff view would be great.

rob0012• 7 months ago

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

zimpenfish5• 7 months ago

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.

merelysounds• 7 months ago

Same.

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

the_shivers8• 7 months ago

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

savolai2• 7 months ago

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

zem• 7 months ago

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.

fwipsy• 7 months ago

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!

zimpenfish5• 7 months ago

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.

matsemann2• 7 months ago

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.

OscarCunningham• 7 months ago

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

netsharc• 7 months ago

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...

Biganon• 7 months ago

John Conway studied similar problems

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

roskelld2• 7 months ago

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%

zimpenfish5• 7 months ago

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.

grodriguez100• 7 months ago

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

ryandrake• 7 months ago

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.

MrGilbert2• 7 months ago

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

bgbntty22• 7 months ago

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.

anigbrowl• 7 months ago

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.

sceptic1232• 7 months ago

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.

klohto• 7 months ago

bruh it’s like Wordle, come back tomorrow

QuantumNomad_• 7 months ago

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

geoffschmidt• 7 months ago

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.)

hombre_fatal• 7 months ago

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.

zwnow• 7 months ago

You can just test without submitting though?

matsemann2• 7 months ago

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

hn8726• 7 months ago

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

goodmatt• 7 months ago

Clear cookies?

gs17• 7 months ago

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.

kanemcgrath• 7 months ago

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.

Zobody• 7 months ago

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.

Macuyiko3• 7 months ago

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...

dyigitpolat3• 7 months ago

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

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

Scaevolus3• 7 months ago

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.

stabbles• 7 months ago

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/...

freakynit5• 7 months ago

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..

johanvts• 7 months ago

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).

emil-lp6• 7 months ago

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

qwertyforce• 7 months ago

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

sunrunner2• 7 months ago

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?'

qsort• 7 months ago

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.

emil-lp6• 7 months ago

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

emil-lp6• 7 months ago

Someone asked about this very problem here:

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

29athrowaway• 7 months ago

A good game. Possibly the 2048 of 2026.

jerbearito• 7 months ago

Very fun

valleyer• 7 months ago

Nice. Reminds me of Rodent's Revenge.

gorgoiler• 7 months ago

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.

cubefox• 7 months ago

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.

stevage• 7 months ago

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

emregucerr• 7 months ago

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.

doctordoctor2• 7 months ago

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.

maartin0• 7 months ago

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

47282847• 7 months ago

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

oliwary2• 7 months ago

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.

michaelmior• 7 months ago

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.

layer83• 7 months ago

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.

anticorporate• 7 months ago

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?

snackdex4• 7 months ago

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

BloodyIron2• 7 months ago

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.

helle253• 7 months ago

'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

alpha-male-swe• 7 months ago

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

gwbas1c• 7 months ago

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.

xg155• 7 months ago

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.

xg155• 7 months ago

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

(jk)

tgtweak• 7 months ago

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).

mbreese• 7 months ago

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.

dllu• 7 months ago

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...

banannaise• 7 months ago

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.

plastic3169• 7 months ago

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.

the_shivers8• 6 months ago

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.

fercircularbuf• 6 months ago

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.

nirolo• 7 months ago

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

g0ran• 7 months ago

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

menzoic• 7 months ago

Leetcode problem

abhi555shek• 7 months ago

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

wseqyrku• 7 months ago

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

n4r9• 7 months ago

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.

pests2• 7 months ago

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

the_shivers8• 7 months ago

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.

dvh• 7 months ago

Horses can't move diagonally or over water.

Ah the famous spherical horse in vacuum

niemandhier• 7 months ago

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 .

rob0012• 7 months ago

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.

Retr0id• 7 months ago

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

daneel_w• 7 months ago

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

the_shivers8• 7 months ago

Just vanilla canvas + Typescript.

tasuki• 7 months ago

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

posed• 7 months ago

I enjoyed it, thanks for making it!

langarus4• 7 months ago

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

langarus4• 7 months ago

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

ronbenton4• 7 months ago

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

langarus4• 7 months ago

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.

g4zj• 7 months ago

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.

rhymemini• 7 months ago

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

ronbenton4• 7 months ago

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

_1• 7 months ago

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

snackdex4• 7 months ago

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

keepamovin• 7 months ago

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.

adonovan• 7 months ago

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

MildlySerious• 7 months ago

That is just delightful.

Reference[1] for anyone wondering.

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

gwern• 7 months ago

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

layer83• 7 months ago

Use staples instead of walls as barriers.

tetris11• 7 months ago

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

lionkor• 7 months ago

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.

ChrisbyMe• 7 months ago

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

Very fun game

sambuccid2• 7 months ago

This feels strangely similar to TDD with the Tranformation Priority Premise

sandyarmstrong• 7 months ago

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

the_shivers8• 7 months ago

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.

zwaps• 7 months ago

Which AI am I training here?

naedish2• 7 months ago

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).

scrumper• 7 months ago

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.

xg155• 7 months ago

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

Groxx• 7 months ago

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.

xp842• 7 months ago

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!

the_shivers8• 6 months ago

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

Arubis• 7 months ago

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

ZeWaka• 7 months ago

lmao, this is beautiful

xg155• 7 months ago

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.

Majromax• 7 months ago

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

xg155• 7 months ago

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

arthurjj• 7 months ago

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

grugdev42• 7 months ago

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?

nickponline2• 7 months ago

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).

emil-lp6• 7 months ago

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

nickponline2• 7 months ago

Ah yes quite right.

alexjplant• 7 months ago

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

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

DonThomasitos• 7 months ago

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

atticus_• 7 months ago

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

sambuccid2• 7 months ago

I want a tool that visualizes code paths in this way

Narushia• 7 months ago

Happy Year of the Horse!

sublinear• 7 months ago

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.

croemer• 7 months ago

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.

DuncanCoffee• 7 months ago

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

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

DougN7• 7 months ago

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.

theo1996• 7 months ago

I dont understand what is the goal of this game

pests2• 7 months ago

Enclose the horse. Horse likes most space.

godisdad• 7 months ago

Looking forward to the AI enabled subscription version

Lammy• 7 months ago

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

MagicMoonlight• 7 months ago

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

komodo99• 7 months ago

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!

abetusk• 7 months ago

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

wirtzdan• 7 months ago

So fun!

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

Aardwolf• 7 months ago

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...

xp842• 7 months ago

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

elestor• 7 months ago

Say that again

zachallaun• 7 months ago

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!

athrowaway3z• 7 months ago

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.

hotsalad• 7 months ago

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.

the_shivers8• 7 months ago

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

genekwame2• 7 months ago

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

genekwame2• 7 months ago

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

SteveJS• 7 months ago

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

dyigitpolat3• 7 months ago

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

falloutx• 7 months ago

Great game

eithed• 7 months ago

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

omgmajk• 7 months ago

Very enjoyable work pastime!

Great stuff :)

milperks• 6 months ago

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!

curioussquirrel• 6 months ago

Such a good game and execution. Thank you

blablabla5552• 6 months ago

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.

blablabla5552• 6 months ago

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.

enclose.horse

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