Pallanguzhi · play with Sheila Ammachi
The old Tamil seed game on a carved wooden board, played against Sheila Ammachi, a 76-year-old who has been unbeaten since 1950 and talks trash in Tanglish.
- Hands-on 2-minute tutorial (Ammachi's palgalaikazhagam) and an illustrated rules sheet
- Three difficulty levels: Chellam, Konjam serious, Ammachi mode
- Manjadi, puli kottai or sozhi seeds
- Live narration of every sow, relay, capture and pasu
- Multiplayer coming soon
Run it
No build step. It's plain HTML, CSS and JS, so open index.html or serve the folder:
python3 -m http.server 5173
Rules played
5 seeds per kuzhi. Sow anticlockwise. If the kuzhi after your last seed has seeds, scoop them and keep going. If it's empty, capture the kuzhi after it. Any kuzhi that reaches exactly 4 while sowing is a pasu, which goes to the owner of that row. The round ends when the player to move has an empty row.
Files
| Path | What |
|---|
js/engine.js | rules + Ammachi's search (negamax, alpha-beta) |
js/game.js | rendering, animation, tutorial, rules sheet |
js/art.js | hand-built SVG: Ammachi, lamps, frame, board icon |
js/paati.js | Ammachi's lines |
js/audio.js | synthesized sounds (no audio files) |
assets/ | painted banana, lotus and sozhi cut-outs |
SEO pages
Articles, the /learn hub, the Tamil guide, sitemap.xml, robots.txt and OG images are generated:
python3 -m http.server 5173 & # og.html renders against the local server
python3 scripts/build_pages.py --og # omit --og to skip re-rendering images
Content lives in scripts/build_pages.py. Change SITE there and in index.html if the domain changes.
