here is my “yes” to all your ideas, but! not to source code :)
Cool, thanks! I've started with the game: https://frank-buss.de/tmp/spreads/ The computer player is still very weak, it is a simple minimax search algorithm, but I found a developer at Upwork who says he can implement a better one. I think would be also fun to allow different board sizes, like 8x8, or 10x10.