Today Would Be Nice

Made with care,
played for keeps.

Krom is a digital Carom board game built by a one-person studio that believes the best games feel like objects.

"Carom is one of the oldest
board games in the world.
We just wanted it
to feel that way.
"
Today Would Be Nice · 2025
The Studio

A digital
prototyping studio

Today Would Be Nice is a one-person studio dedicated to building small, beautiful software. No feature bloat. No dark patterns. No investor roadmaps. Just tools and games that respect your time.

Krom is the studio's first game — and a love letter to a game that's been passed down through generations of South Asian families, often played on a real wooden board with powder on the surface and coins that click when they collide.

todaywould.be
The Origin

A game older than most countries

Carom — also known as Carrom, Karom, or Karrom depending on where you grew up — is a tabletop game believed to have originated in the Indian subcontinent, with roots possibly stretching back to the 18th century. It's played on a square board with wooden coins and a heavier striker, flicked with the index finger to pocket pieces into the four corner holes. The game spread across South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, landing in households where it became a fixture of family life — a reason to sit together after dinner, a way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

Krom digitises that experience without flattening it. The physics are modelled carefully. The rules are intact. The feel — the satisfying click of a coin dropping into a pocket — is rendered through haptic feedback on every device.

The Name

Why Krom?

The game went through several names during development — Carom (too generic), Acrom (closer, but cluttered). Krom landed because it's minimal, pronounceable in every language the game is played in, and short enough to carry the weight of the red queen circle in its logo without feeling busy.

The red dot in the wordmark is the Queen — the most valuable and treacherous piece on the board.

Design Philosophy
International
Typographic Style

meets
the Carom board.

Krom is designed around the principles of the International Typographic Style — the Swiss-influenced design movement that emerged in the 1950s and gave the world clean grids, structured layouts, and type treated as a primary visual element. Every spacing decision, every weight choice, every alignment is intentional.

The colour system is built on Josef Albers' theory of simultaneous contrast — the idea that colours change their perceived hue and value depending on the colours that surround them. The four Albers circles you see throughout the app and site aren't decoration; they're a working diagram. The same red queen piece looks warmer on cream, more vivid on black, and more muted against sage — which is exactly how it behaves on the board.

Typography is set in Inter at weight 400, with careful tracking and minimal hierarchy. The game UI follows the same logic: Bento layouts, flat colour blocks, pill buttons. Nothing that doesn't belong.

Same red · Four different fields

Josef Albers · 1963

Interaction of Colour

In his landmark 1963 work, Josef Albers demonstrated that colour perception is relative — the same hue reads entirely differently depending on what surrounds it. A red circle on cream feels warm and grounded. On black, it glows.

This principle underpins the entire Krom visual system. The Queen's red is the same value across every context in the app — what changes is the field it sits against. Light mode, dark mode, board surface, UI chrome: the same red, always shifting.

It's also just true to how Carom looks in the real world. A wooden board with a red queen on dark powder is a different object than the same board on a pale lacquered surface.

01

No ads.

Ever. The game is free to download. If you love it, there's a tip jar — not a subscription.

02

Open rules.

Traditional Carom rules, documented and public. Nothing invented, nothing removed.

03

No accounts.

Play online with a room code or share link. No sign-up, no data harvest, no friction.

04

One platform.

Built for iOS and Android. Nothing else. Depth over breadth.

Built by one person.
Played by many.

Krom is a studio project by Today Would Be Nice. If you have feedback, a bug report, or just want to say hello — reach out. There's a real person on the other end.