Alternatives
Products that do what A bilingual guide to Thaayam, a Tamil board game does
I saw The Mahjong Guide (https://themahjong.guide/) today and loved how much a good visual explanation can do for an old game. Around the same time, this HN thread about using coding assistants to revive projects you never were going to finish (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47902525) pushed me to actually do something with the idea. That combination sent me down a nostalgia rabbit hole. Thaayam / Dayaakattai is one of those games I played during childhood summers in Tamil Nadu with cousins, and this being summer again just brought those memories…
- 1RV
I made this game to teach my daughter how buffer overflows work. I want her to look at programs as things she can change, and make them do whatever she wants. Building your exploit in memory and jumping to it feels so cool. I hope this game teaches kids and programmers (who seem to have forgotten what computers actually are) that its quite fun to mess with programs. We used to have that excitement few years ago, just break into softice and change a branch into a nop and ignore the serial number check, or go to a different game level because this one is too annoying. While working on the game…
2023 · punkx.org
- 2IW
I grew up on the Infocom games and when microsoft actually open-sourced Zork 1/2/3 I really wanted to figure out how to use LLMs to let you type whatever you want, I always found the amount language that the games "understood" to be so limiting - even if it was pretty state of the art at the time. So I figured out how to wrap it with Tambo.. (and run the game engine in the browser) basically whatever you type gets "translated" into zork-speak and passed to the game - and then the LLM takes the game's output and optionally adds flavor. (the little ">_" button at the top exposes the…
Jan 2026 · infocom.tambo.co
- 3IB
Hi HN! Looking for feedback on this 1v1 and daily word dueling game I've built over the last few months. Play here: https://wordtrak.com/ Or on iOS here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wordtrak/id6760442363 (Android version soon!)
May 2026 · wordtrak.com
- 4SA
I made a chess engine today, and made it fit within 2KB. I used a variant of MinMax called Negamax, with alpha beta pruning. For the board representation I have used a 120-cell "mailbox". I managed to squeeze in checkmate/stalemate in there, after trimming out some edge cases. I am a great fan of demoscene (computer art subculture) since middle school, and hence it was a ritual i had to perform. For estimating the Elo, I measured 240 automated games against Stockfish Elo levels (1320 to 1600) under fixed depth-5 and some constrained rules, using equal color distribution. Then converted…
Feb 2026 · github.com
- 5SI
Hello HN! This is the first game I ever built. It's very simple, but I'm still kind of proud of it because all the pixel art is original. Thanks for taking a look! GitHub link: https://github.com/shajidhasan/shehzadi-in-peril
2024 · shehzadi.vercel.app
- 6
Voronoi Go▲155I posted once before but wanted to share again because a lot has changed. There's now a fairly strong bot to play against (contributed by a community member) and also correspondence games. The combination of these things helps a bit in finding people to play against.
10d ago · voronoigo.com
- 7IT
I've been teaching LLMs to play Magic: The Gathering recently, via MCP tools hooked up to the open-source XMage codebase. It's still pretty buggy and I think there's significant room for existing models to get better at it via tooling improvements, but it pretty much works today. The ratings for expensive frontier models are artificially low right now because I've been focusing on cheaper models until I work out the bugs, so they don't have a lot of games in the system.
Feb 2026 · mage-bench.com
- 8
- 9IB
Dear Hacker News, I'm kindly asking for your participation in the open beta for my AI-managed mini-games website. Thank you in advance! For a limited time window, I'm setting the all-free feature flag to true. I hope you have a lot of fun exploring the AI's sense for games! Here and there, I tweaked it to help with visual consistency. I would be deeply grateful if you opted into analytics. $2,300 in API tokens... Cheers!
Jun 2026 · minigames.world
- 10AW
So, me (dev) and my friend (designer) have been building a website/mobile app to help users manage their game library (think MyAnimeList, but games) for a little over a year. We launched with a very basic set of features, and have been slowing expanding since then. All the code is open source, and most of the things we implemented were direct feedback from users (e.g. being able to import games from Steam/PSN, and the Posts feature). We don't show ads or have any kind of subscription. This is just a hobby project. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated, as honestly the hardest…
2025 · gamenode.app
- 11FC
Hi HN! I built a simple chess game so that my son in Singapore can play chess with his grandfather in China. Why? There is currently no service or open source software that has all of the following: * All processing and assets on a single server (Critical to workaround a firewall) * No email account required (Chinese Internet services typically login via WeChat) * Works on Android browser * Simple to install and config I built it, together with Claude Code, using simple and boring technologies (Django + Client-side JS). I hope that when you use it, you will find it simple to understand…
Sep 2025 · github.com
- 12PA
Hi HN! My cofounder and I just launched PaletAI, a mobile app for playing and creating AI-generated games. What PaletAI does: 1. Create – Describe the game you want to make, AI makes it, no coding. 2. Share – Hit publish and it appears on our TikTok-style home feed. 3. Play - Swipe through thousands of games, save the ones you like. Basically it’s a platform for “vibe‑coded” mobile games. What problems we’re solving: - Creators: No‑code tools still leave you with “now what?” (hosting, marketing). With PaletAI, you just hit “Publish” - Players: Finding quick casual games today means store…
2025 · apps.apple.com
- 13NB
We at Semicolon Developers have released two player version of Nepali board game Baghchal[1]. It can be played at: http://obaghchal.com Game is working fine in Chrome and Firefix latest builds. There are few glitches but if you have ever played Baghchal I'd love to hear your feedback on the game play online. I'd like to credit HN for all the encouragement. I have promised myself to post a Show HN thread with some cool work and this is our first attempt. Deployment wise I am having some difficulties in setting up server. I think we'd have problem scaling it up. If any Nepali hacker is…
2012
- 14AD
I created a daily game where you get a random Bible verse and try to identify the book (e.g. "Psalms", "Genesis", "Luke") in as few guesses as possible. I have absolutely no clue how I got the idea, other than the fact that I grew up in the Orthodox Church and all my other coding projects have been faith-related (a terrible mobile app (1) and slightly broken Byzantine chant website (2) ). I'm a relatively new developer and I've been hungry for a project to build that people will actually use and share around, so I hoped this would fit the bill. Sure enough, friends and family have been…
Jan 2026 · bibdle.com
- 15GA
Hello! I love anki and have been using it for years to learn mandarin, but I'm lazy and always struggled to get over the "motivation hump" to sit down and create a deck. Recently I've been consuming a lot of AI content from youtube, and spent 3 days creating a deck for Andrej Karpathy's "Deep Dive into LLMs" video. This is impractical - so I built a little youtube to anki converter @ asimpleai.com It's rough around the edges... but I would like it to eventually become something useful to community. Feedback and suggestions are welcome! peace
2025 · asimpleai.com
- 16PA
Hi hn, Its been a while since my kid has been dreaming to make videogames, as you know, the entry bar is high, too many technical details are involved. A few months ago, we started making games, we have tried many different ways, from dragging blocks to write code with a high-level library to make it simple, it is still too much work. Getting into the AI boat, I decided to give it a try for making games, turns out that it works super nicely, still, you still have many technical concepts involved, what language should the game be written in? where do you store the file/assets? how do you…
2024 · playcodeai.com
- 17MA
Hi everyone! First time posting. I built this mini memory game in an attempt to beat lazy memory syndrome. because when was the last time you remembered what you did the day before purely based on memory (or without being prompted) ? Super simple fun game for giving our brains a quick workout and actually reminding it on how to remember. If you had those old Nokia phones from the early 90s, the game will seem insanely familiar to you
Sep 2025 · shraddhabuiltitwithai.com
- 18GA
I wanted to learn more about RAG implementations, so I built something to solve the constant digging through manuals whenever we play a game. It's fairly simplistic, but actually has worked pretty well for some of these conflicts. Everythings Open Source on GitHub if you're curious (or have ideas), and I'd love to hear feedback from fellow boardgamers!
2024 · gamegame.ai
- 19
- 20MC
Hey, it's been a long time in the making, but we're finally ready with our public BETA version of our Android application. We're anxiously (and nervously) awaiting your feedback, so please lay it on us. Our biggest fear is hearing nothing. The game is called Super Tic Tac Toe. It's a new take on the old, boring tic tac toe that more often than not ended in a cat's game. The game board is a large tic tac toe board with each square comprised of a smaller tic tac toe board. You and an opponent place your marks on the smaller boards, each move dictating where your opponent may move next (and…
2012
- 21IB
Hi Everyone, I recently wanted to learn Japanese with duolingo but it kept giving me repetitive lessons. So I built an app that gives a variety of lessons from anime. You can try it out here:https://kanjieight.vercel.app/ Thanks everyone.
Nov 2025 · kanjieight.vercel.app
- 22
Hey HN! I built https://tesana.ai/en, a game generation platform that allows anyone to create full games with graphics, game logic, and animations from a simple text prompt - without coding. Tesana has three key features 1. describe your game idea and have Tesana write a game plan for you 2. Build the game iteratively with AI, or let AI self-build the game in a build LOOP. 3) Launch the game on the web, without setting up an engine Tesana has 250 000 builders on the platform today I believe the democratization of game making is a good thing, and hopefully Tesana can help more…
20d ago · tesana.ai
- 23IM
Hi HN, I recently got the AnkiMobile app for iOS for Mandarin. It was buggy and feature-lacking in my opinion, so I made a nice looking Anki-compatible alternative app, with more features. It uses a tuned FSRS5 algorithm and supports image occlusion out of the box. You can import your existing Anki decks into it or create a new one. Pretty quick to add cards with the image feature. I'm using it right now and will add more to it so let me know what you think. FYI, it has a one-off purchase of $14.99 to unlock it for lifetime (no taksies backsies) after a test period of seven days.
Dec 2025 · apps.apple.com
- 24SE
Hey, I've shared this game while it was still a work in progress in one of the Tell HN threads. I was pleasantly surprised that a lot of people tried it, and I got some positive feedback and constructive criticism. Anyway, I found a gamedev library I really like - Kaplay [1]. What I like about it is that easy things are easy. Meaning I could have fun building the game without learning (or fighting) a new tool. I always wanted to make games, but this is the first one I actually did. And I have to tell you - game development sparks joy! It combines so many things (game design, programming,…
Jan 2026 · muffinman-io.itch.io
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