Why a 25-year IT veteran spent his evenings building the card games the internet forgot.
Every South Indian family has a version of this story. Summer holidays at a grandparent's house, a worn deck of cards on a wooden table, cousins arguing over who cut whose suit, and someone — always someone — ending up as the Donkey. That someone was occasionally me.
Kazhutha is one of those games that never needed a rulebook because it was always taught by someone who learned it the same way. Grandparent to parent, parent to child, cousin to cousin. It is fast, loud, social, and occasionally heartbreaking when a well-timed Vettu ruins your escape at the last card.
That gap felt wrong. A game this loved, this widely played across Tamil Nadu and Kerala, deserved better than being locked inside an old APK. So in March 2026, I started building one. And while I was at it — Rummy too.
The classic South Indian trick-taking game. 4 players, 13 cards each, one Donkey eliminated per round. Use the Vettu (cut) to force opponents to pick up cards.
13-card Indian Rummy. Arrange your hand into sequences and sets, then declare before anyone else. Two decks, wild jokers, real-time multiplayer.
The decision to build for the web before anything else was deliberate. Native apps create friction — you have to find them, download them, install them, and then convince your friends to do the same. A web app has no barrier. You share a link, they click it, and the game starts. No app store, no account, no waiting.
Both games should be as easy to start as sending a WhatsApp message. That is the standard I held this to.
I am an IT engineer with 25 years of experience across software development, systems architecture, and infrastructure. Most of that time was spent building things for other people. This is the first thing I have built purely for the love of it.
The entire app — two complete games, real-time multiplayer, bot AI for both, animations, ads integration, stats tracking, leaderboards, deployment — was built from scratch over the course of about a month, mostly in evenings and weekends. Written in Flutter and Dart, backed by Firebase Realtime Database, hosted on Firebase Hosting.
Building real-time multiplayer was the easy part — Firebase handles the heavy lifting. The harder challenge was the bots. Both Kazhutha and Rummy require genuine game sense, not just random legal moves.
The Kazhutha bots use a phase-aware strategy: suit depletion in the early game, tactical cutting in the mid game, and targeted sabotage in the late game. Hard mode bots track every card played and model opponents' hands.
The Rummy bots understand meld structure — they evaluate each card in their hand for sequence and set potential, draw from the open deck only when the card genuinely improves a meld, and discard the card that least connects to their partial groups. They will not give away useful cards to opponents.
Both games are free and will stay free. The roadmap includes a live leaderboard, in-game chat, more bot difficulty levels for Rummy, and at least two more games. If you have played Kazhutha or Rummy under different house rules, I would genuinely like to hear about them.
Feedback, bug reports, and suggestions go directly to me — there is no support team, no ticketing system. Just the flag icon in the app and a developer who reads every message.
No account needed. Pick a game and jump straight into a match.