elect.horse
elect.horse410 points by solarist 6 hours ago
410 points by solarist 6 hours ago
Fun! One less than intuitive piece is that, as far as the game is concerned, evenly dividing a district 50-50 stops that district from counting toward anyone's majority.
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.
I think this is basically a copy of Gerrymandle?
You could add "pretty shameless" before "copy" there. Sheesh.
What next? words.horse which is just Wordle?
words.horse appears to be a blog, but Horsle exists. https://cabletwo.net/horsle/
wordle is just a copy of mastermind
I consider it only "inspired by"
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.
Wordle is inspired by Mastermind, sure, but I don’t think it’s fair to call it a copy. I enjoy Mastermind; I do not enjoy Wordle¹.
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.
Indeed, humanity proceeds largely through refinement of existing ideas, not through random leaps.
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.
not shameless as here is cut and paste from the landing page when all that renders is plain text
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.
which is itself not a new concept
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/teaching-players-to-rig... (2018)
Yeah, when I saw elect.horse I didn't think "Ooh, a new game I've never imagined before". This is a problem, but you can show the problem as part of a fun game. Like Monopoly the point isn't that this is an awesome game, the point is that it's a real problem, but if you have fun that's great too. If you get somewhat good at the game, you can understand the problem better.
Yes but surely you can see that this is copying much more than just the general idea of a game about gerrymandering.
I don't see it, but maybe you have examples where there are specific choices which were copied?
The hex grid (rather than, say, square, or random Voronoi regions). The fact that some hexes have 1 voter and some have zero (rather than, say, all hexes having 1 voter, or any having more than 1). The circular colored dot indicating the voter's party (rather than, say, a picture of a horse, or tinting the entire hex). The "Hint", "Reset", and "Submit"/"Call election" buttons below the grid, in that specific order; and (I assume) the nature of the hints. The "health bar" graphic depicting the number of horse voters and donkey voters.
This is probably a better example of prior implementation with many similar design decisions
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1639370584/mapmaker-the...
Also who the hell cares if something is a “copy”, what matters is if it’s better or worse
Linux is a copy of UNIX. Who cares
Seems like it, though this has a second puzzle with three candidates instead of two
Gerrymandle interchanges the number of candidates: sometimes two, sometimes three, sometimes more
Related: https://enclose.horse/
List of daily "dle" games: https://dles.aukspot.com - warning, it's big.
Mine is the nonogram daily puzzle at: https://lab174.com/nonodle/
Doesn't seem to have https://blueprintle.org/ (which won't make any sense if you haven't played Blue Prince, but unlike Blue Prince itself it is free)
I have played 70 hours of Blue Prince and I still don't know what I'm doing in that game.
It's like Wordle but for Blue Prince rooms. You're trying to guess a specific room, the game will tell you what you got right or wrong about the last room.
But, seventy hours of play should mean that if you narrow down that the correct answer has exactly two exits, costs nothing and is green, it's not lavatory or bookshop :D
Wait what is this site the dles of aukspot? How do you choose - it's overwhelming.
I didn't realize how vast the underworld of dle games was. Brought to you by AI?
hah didn't think my game would be listed there, but it was! https://fivefold.ca
Nice. I assume you've seen the Sudoku puzzles at Logic Masters Germany? Heavily reminiscent.
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.
one of my daily fun routines: - wordle - enclose.horse
I already play Blueprintle (as Wordle is to the dictionary, so Blueprintle is to the Blue Prince room directory) Wordle and Connections but maybe I will pick up one of the horse games when I grow bored of one of them
Recommendation: add the two daily puzzles of Sunflowersgame: https://sunflowersgame.com/
Also “related”, but only vaguely:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b3_lVSrPB6w
:D
Anyone else got something horse adjacent?
It's fun but I can barely see the difference between the horse and donkey colors which makes it really hard.
I don't have colour blindness, I have a colour calibrated display, and I find it hard to differentiate between them.
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.
Seems to be fine on my firefox with ublock enabled. Though the hexes sometimes are confused about which groups I'm modifying, which I'm not sure if that's a firefox thing or not.
Color also seems fine to me. Horse is bright blue and the other is lavender.
It seems that you're indirectly citing my comment, so I have to reply.
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.
I am color blind (red-green) and have the same issue. Not a color-blind friendly color scheme...
FWIW, they are pretty distinct hues, and are easily discernible. I only mention this because a lot of people go through life not realizing they suffer some form of colour blindness, so it's worth knowing. Another possibility is that you're looking at it on a very poor display.
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?
I know I've got deuteranopia. That doesn't help. I still can barely see the difference. What would have helped is picking two colors which weren't so close for people with such a common issue.
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)
> I know I've got deuteranopia. That doesn't help.
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.
You’re being downvoted because you’re discounting other people’s experiences. The hues are easily distinguished /to you/ but not to everyone.
I explicitly noted that someone probably has colour blindness if they can't discern the hues. And it turns out that is the situation in this case, it just wasn't stated.
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.
You are correct. If you can't tell the difference between purple and cyan you probably have color blindness.
bad llm
Uh, what? What is the point of your worthless comment?
There used to be a convention on reddit to respond to some comment bots with "bad bot" or "good bot" and the bot would use that feedback to assess if its responses were helpful. I think maybe wikipedia summaries or things like that.
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.
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got me wondering how many complaints you see online are one shottable by any decent model with 30 seconds of "i have this issue: . provide easiest working solution" prompting
Yesterday I was watching a tv program online on the legitimate website of the broadcaster, but I was really annoyed at the fact that the video stopped whenever I left the tab. So I opened Chrome's devtools, went to the AI tab ad exposed my complaint. In a few seconds it had analysed all the minified sources of the website, found which tracker was responsible of this, and written a script to disable it. Lovely.
That in itself might be a social commentary.. :)
Sure, if you have an IQ of 80.
For people with IQ over 80, highlighting that people in different tribes are actually alike doesn't count as social commentary?
The only people who think republicans and democrats are exactly the same have an IQ of 80.
The "both sides" meme was funny when jon stewart was doing it in 2008. It has run its course.
I took it as a comment about voters than parties.
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.
> 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.
Where can I read more about that evidence?
Because ~70 million of my countrymen have voted for a convicted rapist.
Surely you agree that "both sides" think the other side is full of evil politicians that want to destroy the country AND their voters are complete morons?
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...
What you'd expect to see in a healthy democracy is people who want to fix the bug, and for a while maybe those who most benefit from the bug fight to keep it but eventually there's a broad public sentiment in favour of fixing the bug and so it simply becomes uncontroversial to fix it. Say fifty years. Give it an extra generation if e.g. civil war breaks out interrupting such considerations.
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.
We still have slavery?
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Inmates are frequently forced to work for pennies.
Yup. Quoting Wikipedia: "The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude except as a punishment for a crime where the individual has been convicted"
Mandatory "Penal labour" isn't chattel slavery but it would still be recognised as slavery in any modern understanding.
I am a big fan of both enclose.horse and gerrymandle.com. I play both daily.
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.
Aren't they both ripoffs of the 2019 boardgame Mapmaker?
(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...
It's the same developer...
That's what they are saying. That the enclose.horse people ripping off gerrymandle makes them like enclose.horse less.
What’s your source on that? The owners of Enclose.horse don’t list gerrymandle as one of their games: https://clevergoat.com/all-games
He means that enclose.horse and elect.horse are from the same developers.
(which isn't true btw, enclose.horse was sold by the original developer)
But even gerrymandle is a rip off of a NYT game that never left beta: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/us/politics/congres...
There's a enough of a branding and storyline difference for me to love elect.horse
It literally says “also by us: enclose.horse”
lol we know it's by the same people as enclose horse, the issue is that it rips off gerrymandle
No idea what is this about. Filled land with hay and still lost.
enclose.horse was sold off not too long after it was published. The new owners now seem to be doing a shameless cash grab, ripping off gerrymandle.com 1:1, down to some particularly weird UI choices, and the text copy is transparently LLM-generated. It would be one thing if they added some kind of improvement or unique take, but reskinning (with assets you bought) and throwing ads on it is, frankly, just lame.
To whom was it sold? Any reference for that?
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!
> ripping off gerrymandle.com
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!
For the record, it's just the current puzzle - the colors vary pretty wildly, see for example the previous one: https://gerrymandle.com/game/2026-10-29
There's also a colorblind mode where you can always win the election for blue, if that's more to your political preference! I like that mode just for keeping the colors consistent.
"Win the election for <color>" is Gerrymandle's standard text, and the color changes for each daily puzzle.
Competitve side is much weaker than in enclose.horse, this game only measures hints used.
I honestly don't get today's expert puzzle. When you start, horse is at 8, donkey is at 10, and cow is at 14. I get two districts for horse, which the puzzle then states "horse wins," but wouldn't the final standing then be
horse: 10, donkey: 10, cow: 14
So cow still wins? Why did it say horse wins on the "See results" screen?
Each district you draw is the only thing that counts for voting.
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.
the numbers are just the number of hexes for each candidate, what you care about are the number of colored areas / colored squares. If you see 2 or more blue colored squares above the buttons, then the horse wins, which is what you want.
This was incredibly fun and rewarding, I spent a really long time on the expert puzzle and eventually solved it. I really like that you can use some kinds of deductive logic, as well as trial and error as well! Very very fun.
That's a really concrete demonstration of gerrymandering. Assign it in schools!
It doesn't represent the risk to gerrymandering at all. There are no error bars in voting patterns based on 4 year old data.
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.
because erect.horse does not exist... yet...
Meant to post this, too.
Another great game from the enclose.horse game, both are very fun and really challenging to play depending on the level.
Extremely rude to use such similar colors for this, I can't fuckin tell what I'm doing
Big fan of enclose.horse. Happy there is a sequel
Fun game!
“A tie wins a district for nobody”
I hate this AI slop text
day 8 expert took me about 40 seconds
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