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enclose.horse
- theo1996 9mo agoI dont understand what is the goal of this game
- pests 9mo agoEnclose the horse. Horse likes most space.
- lukebechtel 9mo agoWhich came first -- the game or the domain name?
- divbzero 9mo agoThe game dynamic feels a bit like Wordle: One puzzle per day and different solutions that you can compare with others.
- roskelld 9mo agoEnjoyed 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 9mo agoI thought so too at first but you can just left click to remove the wall actually.
- savolai 9mo agoI would like to be able to compare/switch optimal with my solution with single click.
- the_shivers 9mo agoThis is now implemented on daily levels! Click the link below your score after submission.
- savolai 9mo agoThanks for the pleasant experience of providing a feedback loop for my suggestion, felt rewarding and the implementation works nicely.
- zimpenfish 9mo agoSide by side or a diff view would be great.
- rob001 9mo agoI agree. Also, knowing the max score in advance would be better, so you know when to stop/whether to keep going.
- naedish 9mo agoI'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).
- ahahahahah 9mo agothat 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.
- zimpenfish 9mo ago
- zem 9mo agolots 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 9mo agoI 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!
- zimpenfish 9mo agoI 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.
- matsemann 9mo agoI 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 9mo agoThere'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 https://www.hoodamath.com/games/chatnoir.html
- zimpenfish 9mo agoAh, yes, the one I played recently was basically that (except it was a horse, I think.)
- netsharc 9mo agoA Windows 3.1 game called Rodent's Revenge: https://classicreload.com/win3x-rodents-revenge.html https://classicreload.com/win3x-rodents-revenge.html Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r6CnPzTXKE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r6CnPzTXKE Damn, the good old days when games didn't have loot boxes, ads, etc...
- roskelld 9mo agoI 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 https://enclose.horse Day 8 PERFECT! 100%
- zimpenfish 9mo agoIf 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 9mo agoI don’t see any View Optimal button. Is it present in Mobile ?
- culi 9mo agoI 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
- toxik 9mo agoResults, then scroll down a tiny bit.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- ryandrake 9mo agoCool 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.
- MrGilbert 9mo agoI disagree about the replayability aspect. It‘s a daily challenge, so come back tomorrow. I quite like it.
- bgbntty2 9mo agoI 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.
- MrGilbert 9mo agoThat'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.
- bgbntty2 9mo agoI 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.
- anonymous908213 9mo agoYou 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.
- kanemcgrath 9mo agoI 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.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- Zobody 9mo agoConstraint 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.
- Macuyiko 9mo agoYes. 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/86299dc120478fdff529cab386ffd14a https://gist.github.com/Macuyiko/86299dc120478fdff529cab386f...
- ooopdddddd 9mo agoI 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.
- Scaevolus 9mo agoYes, 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.
- 29athrowaway 9mo agoA good game. Possibly the 2048 of 2026.
- jerbearito 9mo agoVery fun
- valleyer 9mo agoNice. Reminds me of Rodent's Revenge.
- gorgoiler 9mo agoGreat 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 9mo 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 9mo agoTo me the current design doesn't look like anything at all. I don't see a gate or a wall, just two rectangles.
- snewman 9mo ago+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).
- nirolo 9mo agoVery cool game. Immediately reminded me of pathery, which I can also recommend to everyone who enjoys this.
- g0ran 9mo agoSeeing tile animations immediately reminded me of Godzilla 2: War of the Monsters on NES.
- menzoic 9mo agoLeetcode problem
- abhi555shek 9mo agoNice game! I could only play one game but wish I could play previous days' games as well
- wseqyrku 9mo agoYou can. Checkout the Past Puzzles in the menu (top-right).
- n4r9 9mo agoNice 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.
- pests 9mo agoThere is a built in map editor, click the hamburger menu.
- the_shivers 9mo agoAll 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 9mo ago> Horses can't move diagonally or over water. Ah the famous spherical horse in vacuum
- niemandhier 9mo agoThis 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 .
- rob001 9mo agoThis 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 9mo agoI wouldn't be surprised if they're just rawdogging the canvas API
- daneel_w 9mo agoThe canvas API itself is pretty basic. It's not complicated at all to slap graphical tiles onto the screen.
- the_shivers 9mo agoJust vanilla canvas + Typescript.
- tasuki 9mo agoThank you for an interesting game! Is the code also available in a nicer-to-read way?
- posed 9mo agoI enjoyed it, thanks for making it!
- langarus 9mo agolovely, 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/ 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 https://github.com/langarus/enclosure.horse-solution clone it and run make init // make web
- langarus 9mo agoI see some of you are already crashing the server. :melting: try to run it locally if you can't get the result via render
- ronbenton 9mo agoYou caching in memory or disk? Redis or db might survive the crashes and reduce future ones
- langarus 9mo agoon 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.
- rhymemini 9mo agoScore init should say N/EIGH instead of N/A, otherwise great.
- ronbenton 9mo agoReminds me of a comic I saw a couple years back about a horse parliament where the horses only voted “neigh”
- _1 9mo agoThat's from the Far Side. My mom has had this on her fridge for at least 30 years.
- inanutshellus 9mo agoThis appears to be it. :) https://i.pinimg.com/736x/4f/51/e0/4f51e04263a89a008e29668b7bf2654f.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/736x/4f/51/e0/4f51e04263a89a008e29668b7...
- snackdex 9mo agodead. how in the world does a thought like that come into your mind. i feel like i got 0 in creativity
- keepamovin 9mo agoI 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.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- adonovan 9mo agoI think you should change the cherries to a battery and call the game Correct Horse Battery Stable.
- MildlySerious 9mo agoThat is just delightful. Reference[1] for anyone wondering. [1] https://xkcd.com/936/ https://xkcd.com/936/
- gwern 9mo agoOr the cherries could be a delicious pastry or PBJ-like treat: _Collect Horse Buttery Stable_...
- layer8 9mo agoUse staples instead of walls as barriers.
- tetris11 9mo agoOr turn the cherries into sugar lumps, and call the game My Lovely Horse
- lionkor 9mo agoI 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.
- sandyarmstrong 9mo agoIs there guaranteed to be a solution that encloses the cherry? Is Day 8 the first day to have a cherry?
- the_shivers 9mo agoSo 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 9mo agoWhich AI am I training here?
- naedish 9mo agoA 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 9mo agoThis 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.
- xg15 9mo agoI mean, the horse does sometimes talk about the demon god if you click on it, so who knows...
- Groxx 9mo agoYeah, 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.
- xp84 9mo agoThis 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_shivers 9mo agoThanks for the feedback! And there's now one-square-only fences you can turn on in the settings.
- Arubis 9mo agoEach time I see a `horse` domain, particularly for entertainment, I remember to `traceroute bad.horse` and smile again.
- ZeWaka 9mo agolmao, this is beautiful
- xg15 9mo agoLooks 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 9mo agoIt's not just troll levels, see https://enclose.horse/play/n9YDZm https://enclose.horse/play/n9YDZm
- maximgeorge 9mo ago[dead]
- xg15 9mo agoI'm pretty sure the author got the domain first and then designed an (awesome) game around it.
- arthurjj 9mo agoMy 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 9mo agoLove 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?
- nickponline 9mo agoI 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-lp 9mo agoIt's not the same problem. First, it's not directed, second it's a vertex separation problem.
- nickponline 9mo agoAh yes quite right.
- DonThomasitos 9mo agoI love it! I miss a way to see the reference solution, would be nice in order to learn. Or maybe get a hint.
- alexjplant 9mo agoFantastic fun! My humble level contribution is here [1]. [1] https://enclose.horse/play/44wCCO https://enclose.horse/play/44wCCO
- atticus_ 9mo agohttps://enclose.horse https://enclose.horse Day 8 PERFECT! 100%
- sambuccid 9mo agoI want a tool that visualizes code paths in this way
- Narushia 9mo agoHappy Year of the Horse!
- sublinear 9mo agoFun 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 9mo agoI 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 9mo agoNice game, I'm going to sink some time on these! Got 86 points today https://enclose.horse https://enclose.horse Day 8 PERFECT! 100%
- DougN7 9mo agoWow, 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.
- godisdad 9mo agoLooking forward to the AI enabled subscription version
- Lammy 9mo agoIt's like ChuChu Rocket! + JezzBall; two of my favorite games!
- MagicMoonlight 9mo agoThis is a really fun game. And I just realised you can make your own levels!
- komodo99 9mo agoUsability, 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 9mo agoThere is a button that restores your best, it's right under the current score.
- wirtzdan 9mo agoSo fun! I wonder how the wiggle animation is implemented in for the buttons and modal.
- Aardwolf 9mo agoNice 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...
- zachallaun 9mo agoTon 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 9mo agoGreat 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 9mo agoDoes 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_shivers 9mo agoI tried to match what Wordle does, so it should come out midnight in your local timezone.
- genekwame 9mo agoRaaarrrhh. Perfect solution yesterday, perfect solution today! I'm really on a roll lmao. Love it
- genekwame 9mo agoRaaarhh. Perfect solution yesterday, perfect solution today! I'm really on a roll. Love love the game
- SteveJS 9mo agoWife’s comment: “Cherries? It needs to be an apple.”
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- dyigitpolat 9mo agojust 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 https://dyigitpolat.github.io/enclose-horse-solver source: https://github.com/dyigitpolat/enclose-horse-solver https://github.com/dyigitpolat/enclose-horse-solver
- falloutx 9mo agoGreat game
- eithed 9mo agoA nice easter egg - click on a horse, when enclosed, on mobile
- omgmajk 9mo agoVery enjoyable work pastime! Great stuff :)
- milperks 9mo agoI 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 9mo agoSuch a good game and execution. Thank you
- soccercerer 9mo ago[dead]
- blablabla555 9mo agoHi, 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.
- blablabla555 9mo agoHi, 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.