Balbal is made by Barış Dede. It is a one-person project: the code, the design, the tile drawings, the store art and this website.
Where the name comes from
A balbal is one of the stone figures set up beside a kurgan — the burial mounds of the steppe. They stand in rows, and each one has a face cut into it.
So: stones with marks carved on them, laid out in a line. That is already the board.
Why mahjong
Mahjong solitaire is a very old and very good form: the rule takes five seconds to explain and years to master. But nearly every app of it looks the same — the same green felt, the same Chinese tiles, the same three dragons.
Balbal keeps the form and changes the material. The tiles come from Turkic myth: sky, birch and tamga suits; Fire, Wind, Water, Earth; Umay, Tengri, Erlik. The board moves through a geography — from the steppe to Erlik's gate and on to Tengri's Floor.
There is a mechanical difference too: the tray. In the classic form you touch two tiles at once; here the tile you take waits in a tray with four slots. That one change turns the game into a puzzle.
The catalogue
The floor and symbol pages on this site are not written separately: they are generated from the game's own catalogue. Floor names, four-colour palettes, level ranges, sounds and skeletons go from one file to both the game and the site. If a floor changes in the game, it changes here.
The mythological tellings work the same way — the text under each symbol also appears inside the game.
Sources and credits
The tellings draw on Altai, Yakut and Anatolian Turkic mythology. They are not one canonical text; they vary from region to region and most of them were carried orally. What is written here is not an academic source — it is the world of a game, gathered.
Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Interface typeface: Baloo 2, SIL Open Font License.
Contact
Bugs, suggestions, questions: baris@barisdede.com
Instagram: @mahjong_balbal