Cast in Bidri Metal: Four Ancient Karnataka Board Games, Reborn in 3D

Before Ludo, before Snakes & Ladders left the subcontinent and came back Anglicised, our grandmothers drew boards in rice-flour on the courtyard floor and played games older than most kingdoms. This is an attempt to give four of Karnataka’s own games a home that honours where they came from — and looks good enough to keep on your phone.

I’m Naveen Gopalakrishna — an AI Global Black Belt at Microsoft, a compulsive builder after hours. This #AI4Good build is four games shipped together, each its own free web app and Android APK:

Game	What it is	Play	Get the APK
ಸಾಲು ಮನೆ ಆಟ · Saalu Mane Ata	Nine Men’s Morris — align three, break one	play ▶	APK
ಆಡು ಹುಲಿ · Aadu Huli	Goats & Tigers — the asymmetric hunt	play ▶	APK
ಚೌಕಾ ಬಾರಾ · Chowka Bara	The cowrie-and-tokens race	play ▶	APK
ಅಳಗುಳಿ ಮನೆ · Alaguli Mane	Pallanguzhi — the sowing & counting game	play ▶	APK

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The games, and where they come from

None of these are inventions. They’re games with centuries — sometimes millennia — of continuous play across South India.

• Saalu Mane Ata (ನವಕಂಕರಿ / Nine Men’s Morris) is a mill game — three nested squares, nine seeds a side. Form a connected line of three (“a mill”) and you break one of your rival’s seeds. It’s pure strategy, no dice: the same family of game whose boards are scratched into the stone floors of temples at Aihole and into the plinths of countless choultries. A game of foresight.
• Aadu Huli (Goats & Tigers) is an asymmetric hunt on a triangular board — a few tigers try to leap and capture the goats, while a herd of goats tries to hem the tigers in until they cannot move. Two players, wildly different jobs. It’s the South Indian cousin of Bagh-Chal.
• Chowka Bara (ಚೌಕಾಬಾರಾ / Ashta Chamma) is a race game played with cowrie shells for dice on a cross-and-circle board, with safe squares where you cannot be cut. The ancestor Ludo forgot.
• Alaguli Mane (Pallanguzhi) is a mancala — two rows of pits, seeds sown counter-clockwise, pits of four captured. No dice, no luck: just counting far enough ahead. The carved wooden alaguli mane board is a genuine heirloom object in Kannada and Tamil homes.

Each game ships with multiple “worlds” — a Realistic heritage board (carved teak, real seeds), an Original glowing-3D reading, a Modern interpretation, sometimes a Fable world — and the one this post is really about.

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The Bidri world — the reason this build exists

The spark for the whole project was a single question: what would these games look like if a master craftsman of Bidar made them?

Bidriware (ಬಿದರಿ) is a 14th-century metal craft from Bidar, Karnataka. A zinc-and-copper alloy is cast, engraved with floral and geometric tarkashi patterns, inlaid with pure silver wire, and then — the signature move — the whole surface is blackened with a special soil from the Bidar fort, a soil that darkens the alloy to a deep matte black but leaves the silver untouched and brilliant. The result is unmistakable: jet-black metal, glowing silver inlay. A GI-tagged craft, and one of the most striking in the world.

So every game got a bespoke Bidri board — not a generic skin, but a mat whose inlay is designed around that game’s geometry:

	The board, cast in Bidri
Saalu Mane Ata	Three concentric silver-inlaid squares, floral rosette nodes at every point.
Aadu Huli	A triangular hunt-lattice with cast brass tigers and silver goats on the points.
Chowka Bara	A cross-and-circle race board, corner rosettes, cowries resting in the field.
Alaguli Mane	A two-row sowing tray, each pit ringed in silver tarkashi, seeds nested inside.

How we matched real artisan work

Getting AI-generated art to actually read as Bidri — and not as “generic ornate black-and-gold” — took a tight loop:

1. Study first. Real Bidri is matte black, not glossy, the inlay is silver, not gold, the motifs are floral tarkashi and geometric bands, and the craft lives in the contrast — bright metal against dead-black ground. Those became hard constraints, not suggestions.
2. Prompt to the constraints. Every render was pushed toward “near-black blackened-brass ground, brilliant pure-silver inlay, delicate floral tarkashi engraving, museum-quality metalwork, soft studio light with rich reflections” using Azure gpt-image-2. Gold was allowed only as a thin rim highlight — the way a real piece catches light on its edge.
3. Align the board to the mat. The generated ornament had to sit around the playable geometry, not fight it — the central design centred on the board, the surrounding tarkashi filling the field, the way a craftsman composes a real tray. The mat and a seamless table tile were rendered as a set so the world extends past the board.
4. Iterate on light & reflection. Several passes were spent purely on how the silver catches light and how the black holds shadow, until each board looked like a photographed object rather than a texture.

The same pipeline produced each game’s app icon — this game’s own board, cast in Bidri, as the launcher art:

The Bidri work was distilled into a reusable “Bidri style” skill so the look can be reproduced consistently across future builds.

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How it was built

The whole suite is deliberately boring where it counts so it can live forever for free:

• Pure static, mobile-first, Kannada-first. No backend, no accounts, no tracking. Every game is a folder of HTML/JS/assets served from GitHub Pages. The first language is Kannada, English second — not the other way around.
• 3D in the browser. A shared Three.js game core (game3d) renders the boards, pieces and worlds, tuned to run on a mid-range phone. Each game is a thin ruleset on top of that shared engine.
• Four games, one drift-locked core. The games share ~36 modules that must stay byte-identical across all four. A custom rc-gate guards this: it fails the build on any drift, and also runs the full unit-test matrix (668 tests today: Aadu Huli 206 · Alaguli Mane 161 · Chowka Bara 152 · Saalu Mane Ata 149), i18n coverage, JSON-schema contracts, language/voice-pack freshness, and an asset budget.
• Six languages, packaged. Kannada + English are the core; four more languages ship as downloadable text & voice packs so the base download stays lean (an “asset diet” with a default-core build that fetches optional packs from the Pages origin on demand).
• Narration was generated with Azure Speech neural voices; the loose per-clip audio was later replaced with packed narration to cut size.
• APKs, from the same web build. Capacitor wraps each game’s web/ folder; a GitHub Actions workflow builds a debug APK on every release (JDK 21, cap add android, gradlew assembleDebug) and attaches it to the GitHub release automatically. Push to main → Pages redeploys; publish a release → the APK builds itself.
• Art & icons: Azure gpt-image-2. Everything is open source.

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What I learned

• Constraints make AI art authentic. “Ornate Indian” gets you tourist-shop clip-art. “Matte-black blackened alloy, pure-silver tarkashi, no gold except a rim highlight” gets you something a Bidar artisan would recognise. Research the craft, then encode it as non-negotiables.
• A drift gate is worth more than a test suite alone when you’re shipping four near-identical apps. The single most valuable script in the repo is the one that refuses to let the four codebases diverge silently.
• Ship the culture first, the translation second. Building Kannada-first (not “English with a language toggle bolted on”) changed how the whole UI reads. The default is the mother tongue.
• Static + Capacitor is a superpower for heritage software. One web/ folder becomes a free website and an installable app, with zero servers to keep alive — exactly what you want for something meant to outlast any hosting bill.
• A tiny asset budget forces good decisions. Packing optional languages/voices and fetching on demand kept the base app small without cutting features.

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Try it

Free, offline, no account, open source. Pick a game, pick a world, and if your phone’s set to Kannada — it’ll greet you in Kannada.

• ▶️ Saalu Mane Ata — play · APK · source
• ▶️ Aadu Huli — play · APK · source
• ▶️ Chowka Bara — play · APK · source
• ▶️ Alaguli Mane — play · APK · source

If you have grandparents who played these on a courtyard floor, show them the Bidri board. That reaction is the whole point.