Sikku

About

One line, one day

Sikku was made for 6 November 2026, Dhanteras, the first of the five days of Diwali. All week, doorsteps are being swept and decorated with rangoli and kolam to welcome guests and Lakshmi. We wanted to make something that celebrates the cleverest corner of that art: the sikku kolam, where a single line loops around every dot and comes home.

Everything is ready on day one: all 30 puzzles, the speed mode, the studio and the quiz. Nothing unlocks later.

How it works

The engine treats a kolam as a mirror curve, the model popularised by Paulus Gerdes. Dots sit on a grid; a beam of light travels diagonally between them, reflects off the border, and at each gap between two dots it either crosses, turns (a mirror across the gap) or joins (a mirror along it). Tracing the beam until it returns tells us how many separate lines a design has.

Each puzzle is generated from a fixed seed, so everyone gets the same 30 kolams. We first grow a symmetric one-line kolam by trial and improvement, then “un-tap” a few groups of gaps. That number of taps is the par, though you may find a shorter way. Your name kolam is grown the same way from the letters of your name, so the same name always gives the same kolam.

Nothing you do leaves your device. Progress, best scores and settings are saved in your browser's local storage. There are no accounts, trackers or ads.

A note on tradition

Kolam is a living, daily practice, passed down largely among women in Tamil Nadu and the Tamil diaspora, with deep ritual meaning. This site is a playful tribute to its geometry, not a guide to its religious practice. If you have never tried one, the maths page shows how to draw a simple sikku kolam by hand.

Sources

Credits

Design, puzzles and code are original to this site. Fonts: Yatra One and Mukta from Google Fonts. Sounds are synthesised in your browser. No images were borrowed: every kolam on the site is drawn by the code.

शुभ दीपावली. Happy Diwali, and may your line never break.