// project
A Hinglish social-deduction bluffing game of power, satire & second chances — Kursi ke liye kuch bhi karega.
Kursi is a Hinglish social-deduction bluffing game set in a satirical India corporate-political underworld where six archetypes scheme for an empty chair — the Gaddi — and everyone is lying about what they hold. The Neta makes promises he'll forget tomorrow, the Bhai owns silence, the Babu approves nothing, the Jugaadu knows a shortcut, the Vakil has read every exception. Satire targets the archetype, never the person. Under the deadpan Hinglish voice ("सब मिले हुए हैं") sits a serious engineering exercise: one deterministic Kotlin engine that runs identically on Android, iOS, desktop and the web, and powers the AI, the UI and a server-authoritative backend from the same code.
// guided tour
A storyboarded walkthrough of the real app — tap the speaker for the voiceover, or read along with the captions.
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platforms · one engine
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AI bot personas
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roles · 4 story arcs
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toggle rule variants
// multiplatform
The real screens (and, where it's live, the running build) per platform — not a mockup.
Rendered at phone dimensions from the shared Compose UI.
// deep dive
The whole game is a pure function: (GameState, Intent) → GameState, with the RNG seed living inside the state. The same module drives single-player, the bots and a future server — and any match can be replayed byte-for-byte from its seed and intent log.
The board reveals itself in three density layers so a first-timer isn't handed an expert's dashboard. FOCUS shows only whose turn it is, one plain-language line of what just happened, your hand and your legal moves; GUIDED adds gentle coaching; ANALYST is the full instrument panel (suspicion pips, odds, teleprinter log). Players graduate FOCUS → GUIDED → ANALYST by playing. Paired with a tap-to-continue beat gate so the round never resolves faster than you can read it, and a tutorial-first onboarding funnel that teaches one mechanic at a time.
A diegetic court-scribe turns raw engine events into one calm in-character line — grounded strictly on the redacted PlayerView so it narrates the beat without ever leaking a hidden card or inventing the board. It renders the deterministic templated line instantly and upgrades in place if an LLM is available (on-device Gemini Nano / Apple FoundationModels / BYOK cloud), never enters the intent log, and leaves byte-for-byte replay untouched.
Bots use Information Set Monte Carlo Tree Search (1.5k–16k iterations depending on difficulty tier) with an optional cloud-LLM upgrade (Anthropic / OpenAI / Gemini). Ten personas each have a personality profile driving targeting and bluff frequency. The DARBAR layer lets bots form alliances, hold grudges and trade Hinglish table-talk across four story arcs — social manipulation that never breaks engine determinism.
A hidden-information game needs strict secrecy: redact(state, viewer) → PlayerView guarantees a client only ever sees what its player should. Two independent narrative RNG streams keep flavour separate from game logic.
A bespoke lamplit visual language — teak/brass/cream palette, Rozha One display type, Canvas-drawn intaglio role glyphs and stamped-instrument motifs — pushed to an AAA bar in the launch overhaul: every screen dissolved from bordered boxes into one continuous lit table (depth via shadow, never outline), a shared component vocabulary, and an AGSL/Skia runtime-shader material layer (film grain + warm bloom on the felt) with a graceful no-shader fallback. All behind a full Fastlane + CI pipeline with headless screenshot rendering.
New Game (1v1–1v9, Easy→Grandmaster), a KISSA story campaign, GAUNTLET (Tarakki ki Seedhi — a 5-rung ladder ending in 6-player Grandmaster), TAMASHA (spectate ten AI personas scheme and betray), Team Khel (faction play with un-targetable allies), a Tutorial you can't leave until you catch a bluff, local pass-and-play with a handoff screen guard, and online + LAN multiplayer.
Four narrative arcs run at once, fuelled or suppressed by your chat suggestions: GATHBANDHAN (a quiet coalition — watch who breaks first), AFWAAH (a rumour the table acts on even when false), STING (a leaked claim that forces a read), and BADLA (a vendetta that outlives the round). They run on a separate deterministic narrative RNG that never touches card state and resumes byte-for-byte.
All six roles use the Okabe-Ito colourblind-safe palette plus a unique engraved bezel pattern (ring, hatch, dots, weave, double-rule, ticks) so identity reads without colour. Reduced-motion mode swaps every beat for a bespoke static end-frame (GHOTALA = held stamp, SUPARI = tipped chair) — accessibility never flattens the narrative.
An AiProvider interface abstracts Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, on-device Gemini Nano (Android) and Apple FoundationModels (iOS 26); ISMCTS is the always-available offline fallback. Bring-your-own-key, stored in each platform's encrypted storage.
Online and LAN play (private room codes, quick-match, Bonjour/mDNS discovery) run on a Ktor/Netty server that holds all state; clients receive only their redacted PlayerView, so another player's face-down roles can't appear on the wire by construction.
Seven additive rule variants (Bail Pe Bahar, Bali Khel, Hawala, Adhyadesh, Khazana Raj, Mehengai, Tangi) combine freely and default off — the engine is byte-for-byte unchanged when they're disabled, expanding the surface without touching core logic.
// cast
The Politician — Tax +3 (GHOTALA); blocks Foreign Aid
The Don — Assassinate −3 (SUPARI); unblockable except by the Vakil
The Bureaucrat — Steal 2 (VASOOLI); blocks Steal
The Fixer — Exchange cards (SETTING); blocks Steal
The Lawyer — no action; blocks Assassinate only (power through procedure)
The Journalist — Investigate a card (JAANCH); unblockable
// architecture
// under the hood
// gallery
Swipe or use the arrows · tap a screen to enlarge