Why a 25-year IT veteran spent his evenings building a card game 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.
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.
Kazhutha 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. Kazhutha is the first thing I have built purely for the love of it.
The entire app — game logic, real-time multiplayer, bot AI, animations, ads integration, deployment — was built from scratch over the course of about a month, mostly in evenings and weekends. It is written in Flutter and Dart, backed by Firebase Realtime Database for live multiplayer, and hosted on Firebase Hosting.
Building real-time multiplayer was the easy part — Firebase handles the heavy lifting. The harder challenge was the bots. Kazhutha requires genuine game sense: knowing when to cut, which suits to deplete first, when to play aggressively and when to conserve. A bot that plays randomly is no fun to play against.
The bot AI went through several rewrites. The final version uses a phase-aware strategy system — bots play differently in the early game (suit depletion), mid game (tactical cutting), and late game (escape or sabotage). Hard mode bots track every card played, model the other players' hands, and use the Vettu as a targeted weapon rather than a last resort.
The game is free and will stay free. The roadmap includes a live leaderboard, in-game chat, and regional variations of the ruleset. If you have played Kazhutha under a different name or with different rules in your family, I would genuinely like to hear about it.
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. Jump straight into a match — real opponents or bots, your choice.