I did something nearly identical to this for the board game Reversi as part of an exercise to teach myself Python, except the opponent was always a simple minim

I did something nearly identical to this for the board game Reversi as part of an exercise to teach myself Python, except the opponent was always a simple minimax search-based AI. This was back in 2006, though, so I suppose doing it without JavaScript and putting all of the state into the URL was a lot more obvious of an approach back then compared to today. :)