Game guides, the science of play, and stories behind traditional card games from 15+ countries. New posts every Tuesday.
I started with a Sudoku game as a proof of concept. It worked. So I kept building.
Read more โI discovered Euchre while researching North American card games for Cliko. An entire region's identity tied to one card game โ I had to build it.
Read more โArcade games aren't just fast โ they make YOU faster. The research on visual processing speed is hard to argue with.
Read more โOut of 32,000 deals in Windows FreeCell, exactly one has been proven impossible. Its number is 11982. I find that beautiful.
Read more โMy father taught me chess. A computer beating a Go master taught me Go. Both games taught me how to decide under pressure.
Read more โI found Schnapsen while researching European card games for Cliko. The marriage mechanic โ a King-Queen pair for bonus points โ is the most elegant thing in any card game I've built.
Read more โThe best math tutoring doesn't feel like tutoring. I know โ the math puzzles I loved as a kid never felt like homework.
Read more โI found Nurikabe while researching Japanese puzzles for Cliko. It deserves to be as famous as Sudoku. It's not, and I want to fix that.
Read more โI build games as single HTML files under 200KB. The average mobile game is 150MB. That ratio tells you everything.
Read more โFour numbers. Four operations. One target: 24. I played this in school in India before I knew it had a name.
Read more โI play an hour of games every day โ Sudoku, Canasta, Poker. The daily challenge is what keeps me showing up.
Read more โThe most popular 'Mahjong' game in the world has almost nothing to do with the real Mahjong. Here's how that happened.
Read more โBuilding Cliko turned me into an accidental card game historian. Every country has one. Most of them aren't online.
Read more โIf Briscola is Italy's strategic game, Scopa is its loud one. Fast rounds, table-slapping sweeps, and scoring rules that reward greed.
Read more โWord games light up more brain regions at once than almost anything else. I didn't need a study to tell me that โ I felt it.
Read more โEvery 90s kid remembers Minesweeper. I clicked my first mine on a Windows 95 machine in Mysuru. Decades later, I built a better version.
Read more โPattern recognition is how I read a Calcudoku grid and how I debug code. Same muscle, different context.
Read more โI found Briscola in the same research rabbit hole that led me to Basra. The Mediterranean card game tradition runs deep.
Read more โI built my own divisibility theorems as a kid. Mental math isn't a school skill โ it's a life skill.
Read more โSpider Solitaire is the game I played until the moves became automatic. It's also the reason Cliko Games exists.
Read more โI didn't touch a 52-card deck until 11th grade. Then I couldn't stop. These five games are why.
Read more โI was seven when I found the book. Ten days later, every puzzle in it was finished.
Read more โI grew up solving math puzzles in South India where teachers encouraged this stuff. Turns out they were onto something.
Read more โI found Basra because Spider Solitaire got boring. I didn't expect a card game from Beirut to ruin my sleep schedule.
Read more โ