Show HN: A bilingual guide to Thaayam, a Tamil board game
amal-david.github.ioI 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 back.
So I made a small bilingual guide for it, in English and Tamil.
One thing this also made me realize is how strange and nice it is now to be able to build small things semi-passively with tools like Codex. You can have a little idea, keep nudging it between work or life, and a few hours later there is an actual site instead of another note sitting in a backlog.
The site includes the board, stick throws, safe squares, capture/finish rules, odds, strategy notes, history, and a little Dayakattai roll simulator. There are many ways to play mahjong. Which rules do you use? Just noticing this, i have covered all the rules in the guide. It's not as complicated as Mahjong. Much simpler and as mentioned earlier it is regional to south India