elect.horse
elect.horse
elect.horse
A few months ago I received an email from the current owner of enclose horse, inquiring if I was willing to sell gerrymandle. I was not interested.
Enclose horse was a big inspiration for me, since it's such an elegant game. So I'm very sad to see that they have decided to copy my game.
I know that Gerrymandle is not a completely unique game, I was personally inspired by an old NYT article. But I like to think I at least gave my own spin on the genre.
I guess this is just the world now, but I am very disappointed
You did a fantastic job with gerrymandle, but elect.horse has a cozy little story line and way different look to it, albeit the same game mechanics.
To show what I mean, try playing one of these more "realistic" maps that I created: https://gerrymandle.com/map/philadelphia_pa_2016_democrat
and then try playing a daily puzzle: https://gerrymandle.com/game/2026-09-29
To me at least, the difference is obvious. It's much more fun to play the daily puzzle. What I did was turn an interesting concept into a fun puzzle game, while elect.horse just reskinned Gerrymandle.
What next? words.horse which is just Wordle?
Even the simplest details are different, like e.g. in Wordle you know which letters are in the right or wrong places but in Mastermind you only know some are but not which.
¹ And because this is HN, I have to point out that that is just a personal preference, it does not in any way reflect on you, the reader. You are free to enjoy or dislike whatever you want.
Some of these refinements are much more important than most new ideas.
And making a gerrymandering game is a relatively obvious idea that I’m sure hundreds of people have had independently.
Mastermind has equiprobability of colors and configurations.
Wordle has etaoin shrdlcu. There is some structure close to interleaved vowels and consonants. Also an arbitrary list of real words.
TIL, this was not a typo and is the ordered sequence of most common letters appearing in English words.
Telegraph operators ranked the letters as etaonrish.
elect.horse is a daily gerrymandering puzzle: the horse is losing the popular vote to the cow, the donkey and the goat, and you draw equal districts on a hex map so it wins the most seats anyway. It needs JavaScript to play.
I only clicked because I have a horse, with whom I spent a few miniuts out in the paddock before daylight listening to the coyotes whoop it up so close you could smell there not dog , but not bad, odor.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/teaching-players-to-rig... (2018)
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1639370584/mapmaker-the...
Linux is a copy of UNIX. Who cares
Ulysses is a copy of the Odyssey, Minecraft was a copy of Infiniminer, Stardew Valley copied Harvest Moon, Fortnite copied PUBG, film directors copy and spread each others’ techniques and storylines all the time. George Lucas even admits that Star Wars was heavily based on Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, while Kurosawa’s film was derived from historical plays and John Ford’s westerns.
"Blue Prince" is heavily inspired by earlier works, those works just aren't video games. You could say the same all the way back to ADVENT, the Colossal Cave Adventure of the 1970s being inspired by adventures in an actual cave.
Of course good games do something we haven't seen before or do it better, but they are also invariably products of a wider culture. A big part of why Animal Well doesn't need to explain itself is that a modern video game player knows how this sort of game works and so when they get Slink or B Wand or similar they realise they can explore places they couldn't reach before.
Or are you perhaps using a game that was merely inspired by another concept but expanded on it in brand new ways to defend a game that is literally identical to what it's copying?
So if Blue was only present in a single district where its the majority, you could have ten more districts all evenly tied between Purple and Orange, and Blue would still win.
But this rip-off of gerrymandle.com makes me feel less inclined to continue playing enclose.horse.
And yes, it is a rip-off, not merely a riff on the general puzzle game of this type.
It's akin to joke stealing among comedians. It makes you lose respect for the joke stealer, even if their original stuff is good.
(Great Kickstarter, they played games of it on the steps of the supreme Court, and had pledge levels where you could have copies sent to your Congresspeople or the court)
Mapmaker: The Gerrymandering Game, via @Kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1639370584/mapmaker-the...
The game in the post is basically identical to Gerrymandle, they're far more similar to one another than either game is to what you've posted.
(which isn't true btw, enclose.horse was sold by the original developer)
There's a enough of a branding and storyline difference for me to love elect.horse
Mine is the nonogram daily puzzle at: https://lab174.com/nonodle/
One suggestion, and maybe I'm just holding it wrong: when I started the daily puzzle, I had to scroll down to read through the rules, which I assume starts the timer while I'm still learning the symbols. It would be nice to have an interim page with a summary of the symbols so the timer doesn't start immediately.
I didn't realize how vast the underworld of dle games was. Brought to you by AI?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b3_lVSrPB6w
:D
Anyone else got something horse adjacent?
javascript:(()=>{const e=document.documentElement;let n=parseFloat(e.dataset.hue||"0")+20;if(n>=360)n-=360;e.dataset.hue=n;e.style.filter=n?"hue-rotate("+n+"deg)":""})()
Sorry for the previous one, it was too long.
Also, Firefox blocking Canvas elements does something really funky to the hex tiles making it harder. Allowing access does make the tile background change to pink/yellow-green instead of them all being lilac/lavender/purple animations.
The colours make it too difficult for me on a good display, and the dancing 'thing' (wheat?) doesn't help.
Color also seems fine to me. Horse is bright blue and the other is lavender.
You really have trouble differentiating between 5fd3ff and b58cff? These are dramatically different hues (65 degrees on the colour wheel).
I mean, maybe the site is A:B testing different hue combinations, or there is a technical fault happening for some users, but if you really have trouble differentiating those two hues, one of your two declarations at the beginning of your comment must be false.
So yes, while I can tell the difference between these two colours doesn't make it good to play or an acceptably accessible choice even for those with good colour vision. They are objectively too similar.
Either you are in denial about a personal vision deficiency, or you bought your display on Temu. Or you're just trying to show some sort of vision solidarity with the colour blind, which, fair enough. We should all be more thoughtful of accessibility.
We all know that these aren't good colours for the small percentage of people with colour blindness. I literally directly addressed it in my root post, to then get confirmation that the person has colour blindness. Citing a page literally regarding being accessible to the colour blind is not making your case.
They are objectively, blatantly clearly different hues to the vision normal. Which is why I addressed the comment wondering if the person had colour blindness, which they of course do.
Objectively different hues is bunk: #fffeff is 120 degrees from #fffffe - I defy anyone to tell them apart. It's just not as simple as hue as the only factor.
EDIT: I've now been "downvoted" multiple times for this harmless observation, and now have a clown declaring me a "bad llm". Is this what HN is reduced to?
What frustrates me is that this has happened even with color coding in video games where I myself was part of the UI team and flagged the issue a year before release. (Need For Speed, 2015)
Seems like something you should probably declare upfront if you're complaining about the colour choices, right? As is your comment looks weird to the vast majority of people -- and yes, the vast majority of people are not colour blind -- who have no issues with the colours.
Should every colour-based game, chart, display, and so on have colour blind modes or safer colour selections? Sure.
I didn't discount anything, and that's a simply ridiculous slur. My observation was absolutely correct.
Yes, a very small minority of people have trouble with certain hue combinations.
Then I think it became a kind of put down and/or a way of saying certain inauthentic comments seemed insincere. In this context as reply to you, though, it feels pretty inexplicable.
The "both sides" meme was funny when jon stewart was doing it in 2008. It has run its course.
It didn't even occur to me that it was saying republicans and democrats are the same. That's just ridiculous ;-)
Edit: To clarify there's good evidence that people overestimate the degree to which people on the other side of the political divide hold extreme views by about a factor of two. We genuinely are less different than we think. It's not necessary for people to be the same for this to be true.
Where can I read more about that evidence?
Because ~70 million of my countrymen have voted for a convicted rapist.
If accurate, I'd say "only about 30%" of each side having extreme views is quite concerning, regardless of anyone's perceptions.
Real differences in policy still matter:
https://isps.yale.edu/news/2026-09-09-political-polarization...
What is easier to change than people's opinions, is the two party political system which tends to resolve such questions to one of the two extremes based on one side achieving a tiny majority, rather than to the average which is usually a lot more sensible.
And surely you can agree that each side has key issues they feel very strongly about (abortion on the left, guns on the right) and again, think the other side's view on said issues are utterly disgusting, right?
And SURELY you can agree that gerrymandering has occurred at various times in the past, from both sides, can't you? For example, take a look at the map of Illinois congressional districts[0]. Perfectly sensible districts here, yessir!
The low IQ take is pretending there aren't places where both sides do in fact behave the same way.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois%27s_congressional_dis...
But Gerry died in the nineteenth century. This practice is almost as old as the United States of America itself. I would say it's as bad as if the US still had slavery, or still had capital punishment, but oh yeah it still has both of those too. Do better.
Inmates are frequently forced to work for pennies.
Mandatory "Penal labour" isn't chattel slavery but it would still be recognised as slavery in any modern understanding.
(would appreciate more geo games)
there's a few
I still thought it was some single persons product.
Update; ah ok sold to two people, not some huge company - https://enclose.horse/about-us:
---- Our Story
Enclose.horse was originally created by Shivers as an interesting optimization problem, the kind of thing you'd find in a Leetcode challenge or an Advent of Code puzzle. But after prototyping it, it turned out to be genuinely fun to play, and it grew into a fully-fledged game.
Today, enclose.horse is developed and maintained by Ryan and Praveen. We're constantly adding new features, puzzle mechanics, and quality-of-life improvements based on community feedback. If you have ideas, we'd love to hear them!
I'm used to game developers sometimes displaying their political preferences through their art, but I have to say that Gerrymandle's "Win the election for orange." is still quite on the nose!
Part of the reason this next cycle is looking so bad for Republicans is _because_ of the gerrymandering they tried backfiring on them because they cut the lines too close to try and gain more seats.
Another great game from the enclose.horse game, both are very fun and really challenging to play depending on the level.
horse: 10, donkey: 10, cow: 14
So cow still wins? Why did it say horse wins on the "See results" screen?
So, "gerrymandering" the districts to make it so the least popular "party" wins is the objective of the game. What's maybe not clear about the game is that each dot represents one animal and not say another mini district.
I hate this AI slop text