I am tempted to call this a shameless rip-off. Dots is a popular game that has been around for some time, the gameplay is exactly the same, and looking at the github I see no attribution. I find it pretty unlikely that the creator purely coincidentally made an identical game.
You can make "loops": link at least four squares of the same color in a loop and it will remove all the squares of that color on the board. This seems to be a quite unique feature that you find in both Dots and Zop.
I know that dots does the same thing. I'm refuting the GP who says the game implements no novel behavior (implying that dots has no novel behavior, and that it isn't ripping anything it off). The box behavior is novel and proves that it is ripping dots off since it isn't a rule that you find obvious.
It's similar to SameGame, which traces back to a Japanese game from 1985. The only difference with Dots is that you have to trace a path through the connected blocks, so you can't disappear quite as many.
This fails to load in Chrome due to an uncaught security error. It looks like it's trying to access window.localStorage in a weird way. Also, the clay.io link hijacks the back button, inserting their main site in the history. I think a better link would be the original, which does not have these problems and works in Chrome: http://zop.zolmeister.com/
Edit: It looks like the Chrome error has been fixed. Still, I'm not a fan of the history hijacking.
I notice a non-standard behavior of inserting his homepage before redirecting, and was wondering what HN thought. Is that the behavior you mean? Because the back button works fine, it just has another stop along the way.
Part of me thinks this is genius. Sure, users have to click back twice to get back to HN, but from his perspective, it exposes a lot of people to other content of his in a relatively harmless way.
TBH, I assumed I had clicked through to the game from his home page until I took the time to investigate.
I somehow remember websites that hijack the back button (probably because it one of my larges annoyances). I don't click on links to websites that do it unless I open it in a new tab. It's extremely annoying if someone wanted to see your homepage they would have clicked in the banner at the top of the page. Obviously I wanted to go back, that's why I clicked the "back" button, its not called a "homepage" button. /rant
Yup. I wonder how people would like it if I rewrote history to send people to bing or pornhub or something when they clicked back once and made them click back twice to get back to hn...
It's grey hat, and a mild example of fuck the user for profit you see all over the web. That sort of thing doesn't go down well anywhere, but especially on HN.
While we're on the topic of Dots, my favorite way to learn a new programming language lately has been to implement a clever "solver" for this game in the language (to maximize score). I wrote one in Go a while ago, and Rust recently.
Also in my opinion this game is more fun when you're working with a finite number of moves rather than time.
I'd be interested to know who created the original.