lioza

Lioza grew from a stubborn design constraint: make a strategy game calm enough to learn in minutes without removing the choices that make another round interesting. Ankur kept the core around drafting coloured stones, then built three real bot difficulties, pass-and-play for two to four people on one device, and online matches you join by code or by quick match — each playable on a wall that shows where every colour belongs, or one that starts blank and makes you choose.

It is one Next.js codebase in three places. Capacitor wraps the same web build into the Android and iOS apps, so the game runs in a browser, on the Play Store and on the App Store without a second implementation to keep in sync. The bot is a minimax search running in a web worker rather than a difficulty slider that cheats, which is the part a board-game player notices first.

Two failures are worth keeping in the record. On some Sony phones running Android 16, stones rendered blank, faded or in the wrong colour; that was fixed and a reduced-graphics option added. And a player on a phone with three-button navigation found a bottom bar covering a row that could not be scrolled into view, because its clearance was a constant instead of the system inset. Both were shipped bugs, and both were found the way real ones are.