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.

The gameplay is extremely simplistic and not novel in any way, it's entirely possible this was made without knowing what Dots is.

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.

Dots goes further; if you encase some other circles in Dots, they turn into "explosives"; this does not.

The behavior of removing all the dots of the same color when you make a square is definitely novel.

Nope, dots does the same thing, and more.

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.

Connecting similar items vertically and horizontally to form combos isn't novel at all. He could have easily come up with this. Who gives a shit?

I wonder if the gameplay in Dots was already taken from something that was open source?

If not, I agree completely - the whole "make a square to remove all of a colour" mechanic is in there too..

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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SameGame