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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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 think this is basically a copy of Gerrymandle?
It looks like it: https://gerrymandle.com/
This one doesn't load for me
The horse version feels more fun and cozy.
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
Ah. First time I've seen either.
which is itself not a new concept
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/teaching-players-to-rig... (2018)
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?
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.
You could add "pretty shameless" before "copy" there. Sheesh.
What next? words.horse which is just Wordle?
The Zynga of small cute puzzle web-games.
words.horse appears to be a blog, but Horsle exists. https://cabletwo.net/horsle/
wordle is just a copy of mastermind
if letters were colors?
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.
With you always working make sure blue wins.
Gerrymandle doesn't have horses
Clone software they said, it will be good they said
the more such site the better it is.
Related: https://enclose.horse/
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://xkcd.com/936/
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b3_lVSrPB6w
:D
Anyone else got something horse adjacent?
List of daily "dle" games: https://dles.aukspot.com - warning, it's big.
Mine is the nonogram daily puzzle at: https://lab174.com/nonodle/
hah didn't think my game would be listed there, but it was! https://fivefold.ca
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?
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)
It's fun but I can barely see the difference between the horse and donkey colors which makes it really hard.
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.
That's exactly how you look like to the rest of the world boy
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?
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.
You are correct. If you can't tell the difference between purple and cyan you probably have color blindness.
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.
I am color blind (red-green) and have the same issue. Not a color-blind friendly color scheme...
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.
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.
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.
Competitve side is much weaker than in enclose.horse, this game only measures hints used.
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.
It's the same developer...
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)
I mean to say that it's owned by the same people
It's from the same people!
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
To the other commenters: @jawns means a rip-off of gerrymandle.com
because erect.horse does not exist... yet...
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.
> 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!
"Win the election for <color>" is Gerrymandle's standard text, and the color changes for each daily puzzle.
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.
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!
That's a really concrete demonstration of gerrymandering. Assign it in schools!
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.
Fun game!
Big fan of enclose.horse. Happy there is a sequel
day 8 expert took me about 40 seconds
It'S a TwO pArTy SyStEm!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7l9QmtiXHU