Catch The Cat

Introduction

Chat Noir — also known as Trap the Cat, or Circle the Cat — is one of those Flash-era puzzles that outlived Flash itself: darken hexagonal cells one at a time to wall in a cat before it reaches the edge of the board, and every click gives the cat exactly one move in response. ganlvtech's Catch The Cat, first published in 2019, is a small MIT-licensed Phaser reimplementation of that idea, built to be dropped into any page as a single script tag. It is faithful, it is functional on a desktop, and it does not survive contact with a phone.

Gameplay

The rules are unchanged from the original: an 11x11 hex grid, eight walls scattered at random before the first move, and a cat that starts in the centre and takes one step for every dot you darken. Win by boxing it in completely; lose the moment it reaches the outer ring and bolts. Played out to both a win and a loss during review, the loop holds up exactly as well as it always has — it is a genuinely well-designed piece of puzzle logic, and that is entirely to the original designer's credit, not this port's.

The cat's escape routing here uses a shortest-path-to-the-edge heuristic with a route-count tiebreaker (readable directly in nearestSolver.ts), which is a reasonable approximation but a simpler one than the flood-fill "safe zone" analysis the genuine article is known for. In practice it is beatable with attention and loses to careless play, which is the correct difficulty band for a casual puzzle — but it will not challenge anyone who has actually solved the original enough times to know how the trap works.

Controls and the mobile experience

This is where the review turns. The block circles fire real pointerdown events, so a tap does register as a tap rather than a mis-measured click — that part of the registry's note is accurate. The problem sits one level up: the game's index.html hard-codes an 11x11 board at a 20px circle radius with no responsive sizing logic at all, which Phaser renders as a canvas element a fixed 570x501 CSS pixels regardless of the size of whatever element it is dropped into.

Tested inside a same-origin iframe sized to a realistic mobile content column (354 CSS pixels wide, matching what leetdom's own game-page template would hand it on a phone), the canvas simply overflowed the frame. The right third and bottom third of the board, and both the reset and undo buttons sitting below it, rendered completely outside the visible area — and a follow-up touch-swipe test confirmed the overflow does not scroll; the content is just gone. No manifest aspect or maxWidth setting fixes this, because the limiting dimension is the phone's own screen width, not the box leetdom draws around the iframe. Short of patching the shipped bundle's board dimensions, a phone visitor cannot finish — or in many openings, even start — a round.

Visuals and interface

The presentation is plain but coherent: pale blue dots, navy walls, a simple black cat sprite, no clutter. It reads fine at a glance. What it does not do is speak English. Every status message — "click the dots to trap the cat," both win and lose lines, the reset and undo button labels — ships in Chinese with an empty translation table wired up but never filled in. That is a real accessibility gap for an English-language site, independent of the mobile problem above.

Originality and reception

The repository sits at 755 stars and 209 forks against two real contributors, which reads less like organic interest in playing the game and more like the kind of small, forkable project that circulates as a first-pull-request exercise — the issue tracker's four closed items ("GG," "how can vin?," a request to make the circle color configurable) support that reading rather than contradicting it. There is no jam placement, no press coverage, and no meaningful fork that extends the concept. This is a straight, competent port of someone else's twenty-year-old idea, executed correctly and shipped nowhere further.

Final verdict

A well-known puzzle, correctly rebuilt, free of bugs, free of ads — and, as delivered, unusable on the exact device class this section exists to serve. The desktop experience alone would sit around the middle of the scale as a pleasant, unoriginal diversion. The mobile failure is not a rough edge; it removes the controls and a majority of the board entirely, and that outweighs everything the desktop build gets right.