Дуутаа is a guessing game built entirely around Mongolian music. It plays a tenth of a second of a song — one transient, barely a sound — and asks for the title. Miss and it gives you half a second, then two, then eight, then fifteen. Guess early and you keep the points.
The catalogue runs to 3,322 songs by 116 artists, spanning 2005 to today. The five difficulty tiers are relative rather than absolute: every song is scored on artist familiarity, Apple Music’s own ranking, its place on the daily Apple Music Mongolia chart and how recently it came out, and the catalogue is then cut into five slices — from the standards everyone knows up to one called simply Impossible. Before a round starts you can narrow it by era, by genre, or down to a handful of specific artists.
There is a party mode as well. The host sets the round up — how many songs, how long each one runs, which tier, era, genre and artists are in play — then shares a four-letter code. Everyone hears the same songs in the same order, and the scoreboard ranks players by who named each track earliest rather than by who simply got it.
The catalogue is its own piece of engineering: every entry is cross-checked against the iTunes Search API so artist and title metadata stays honest as it grows, and the site publishes the date it was last refreshed. Search matches Cyrillic and Latin spellings of the same title, and tapping any cover plays that track’s full 30-second preview — so the catalogue doubles as a way to browse Mongolian music you have not heard. The audio never touches my server either; clips stream straight from Apple’s preview CDN to the player’s browser.
It ships as a single Docker container behind a health-gated pipeline, sharing a VM with my other services, and reads in English or Mongolian from a toggle in the header. Progress, streaks and settings live in the browser, so there is nothing to sign up for, and the running costs are covered by a QPay donation page rather than a paywall.
Highlights
- Progressive reveal — 0.1s → 0.5s → 2s → 8s → 15s, with the score falling at every step.
- Difficulty is computed, not hand-assigned — artist familiarity, Apple Music ranking, the daily Apple Music Mongolia chart and release recency, cut into five tiers.
- Catalogue search matches both Cyrillic and Latin spellings of the same title.
- Rounds filterable by era (2000s / 2010s / 2020s), genre, or hand-picked artists.
- Multiplayer rooms: four-letter code, identical song order, shared scoreboard.
- Streak, win rate and score distribution tracked per player in the browser — no account to play.
- Catalogue audited against the iTunes Search API so artist and title metadata stays clean.
- Clips stream straight from Apple’s preview CDN — no audio is hosted or proxied.
- Bilingual interface (English / Mongolian) over an all-Mongolian catalogue.
- Host-configurable rooms: song count, clip length per song, tier, era, genre and artist selection.
- Single Docker container on a health-gated deploy, running alongside my other services on one VM.
- Running costs covered by a QPay donation page — no paywall on any part of the game.