There is a horse in the middle of the field. It wants to escape, run free, to graze upon the grass where it thinks it is greener. The horse knows not of the dangers of the outside world, for it is simply a horse. So what must we do? We must put up enclosures to form a pasture for the horse, yet we only have so many walls to use, so we must be choosy. This, more or less, is enclose.horse, a daily puzzle game where you must stop a horse from running away to eat grass.
I’ll take off my prose hat and tell you what you quite literally do in enclose.horse. The game is based on a 14×14 grid, a majority of tiles consisting of just grass, with various exits the titular horse can take. With each puzzle, you have a set number of walls you can put up to form an enclosure for the horse, with each tile turning to wheat once it’s been successfully enclosed. For every tile within the enclosure, you get a point, and then you submit your total to the leaderboard in hopes of besting everyone else.
There are various other sorts of tiles that can net you bonus points, like cherries and apples which increase your score if you manage to keep them within the enclosure. Bees, however, net you negative points if they’re kept in with the horse; you can get a negative score. So this becomes a game about careful wall placement, about finding just the write spot to maximise your point tally before submitting it (once you have, that’s it, it’s locked in).
Having come quite late to enclose.horse, there’s plenty of past puzzles to catch up on, with 138 days to try your hand at at the time of publishing, not to mention bonus rounds that can be unlocked for certain days too. You can even make your own levels for others to play, and vice versa. It’s a very tidy little package all in, certainly a nice little brain stumper to challenge yourself with each day. Makes a nice change of pace from having to figure out the daily Wordle too. Speaking of, I wonder if today’s word is horse…
