Ludo is the English descendant of Pachisi, a cross-shaped race game that has been played in India for centuries. In the 1890s it was simplified for Victorian families, given a square board, a single die and a Latin name, and patented in England. From there it spread around the world and came back to India, where it is now one of the most familiar games on any phone.
Here is how a courtyard game of emperors became the four-color board in your kitchen drawer, and the game you can play right now at /ludo.
Pachisi: the cross-and-circle game of India
Pachisi takes its name from the Hindi word for twenty-five, which was the highest throw you could make. Instead of dice, players traditionally threw six or seven cowrie shells and counted how many landed with their openings facing up.
The board is a cross, usually embroidered on cloth, with a large square in the middle called the charkoni. Each arm has three columns of eight squares. Every player has four beehive-shaped pieces, and four players normally play as two teams: yellow and black against red and green. Pieces leave the center, travel counterclockwise around the whole cross, and return to the center to finish.
Twelve squares are marked as castles. A piece resting on a castle cannot be captured, which gives the game the same “dash between safe spots” feeling that Ludo players know well.
How the cowrie throw scored
Scoring schemes varied by region and family. One commonly cited system for six shells looks like this:
| Shells facing up | Move | Extra throw? |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | 25 | Yes |
| 1 | 10 | Yes |
| 2 | 2 | No |
| 3 | 3 | No |
| 4 | 4 | No |
| 5 | 5 | No |
| 6 | 6 | Yes |
The big throws of 10 and 25 made every turn a small gamble, which is part of why the game felt more dramatic than its cube-die descendant.
How old is Pachisi?
Nobody knows exactly, and it is worth being careful here. Cross-shaped board games appear in Indian art going back many centuries, and a carving at the Ellora Caves showing the god Shiva and the goddess Parvati at a board game is often linked to this family. The famous dice match in the Mahabharata is also popularly called a game of Pachisi, but the epic describes a gambling game with dice, and its details do not clearly match Pachisi’s rules.
What is clear is that Pachisi sits in a family of closely related Indian games. Its best-known sibling, chaupar, uses the same cross-shaped board but replaces the cowries with long, stick-shaped dice. The two games share so much that older accounts sometimes use the names interchangeably.
Akbar’s living game board
The most famous Pachisi story involves the Mughal emperor Akbar, who ruled in the second half of the 1500s. He is said to have played on giant boards laid out in palace courtyards, using people dressed in the players’ colors as the pieces while he called the moves from above. A courtyard at the palace complex of Fatehpur Sikri, near Agra, is traditionally pointed out to visitors as one of these life-size boards.
The details of the story come mostly from later travelers’ accounts, so treat it as a well-loved tradition rather than a documented fact. Either way, it shows how far up Indian society the game reached: it was played on cloth mats in villages and on stone floors in palaces.
From Pachisi to Ludo in Victorian England
During British rule in India, officials, soldiers and their families brought Indian games home. By the late 1800s, several English versions of the cross-and-circle game were on sale. A British patent for a version called Royal Ludo was granted in the 1890s; sources give the year as 1891 or 1896. The name was simply Latin for “I play.”
The English publishers did not just rename the game. They reshaped it for a quick evening at home:
| Pachisi | Ludo | |
|---|---|---|
| Board | Cloth cross, three columns per arm | Square board with a cross-shaped track |
| Randomizer | Six or seven cowrie shells | One six-sided die |
| Players | Usually two teams of two | Two to four, each playing alone |
| Starting area | The center square | A colored yard in each corner |
| Entering play | Varies by region | Roll a six to bring a token out |
| Finish | Back to the center | Up your own colored home column |
| Safe spots | Twelve castle squares | Home column, plus marked safe squares in many versions |
The result was faster and easier to teach to children, which is a big reason it caught on.
Ludo’s cousins around the world
The same idea traveled in several directions and picked up local names and rules:
- Parchís in Spain and Parqués in Colombia, both close to the original cross design.
- Petits chevaux, “little horses,” in France.
- Fia in Sweden.
- Uckers in Britain’s Royal Navy, a tougher, more tactical Ludo with its own sailors’ rules.
- A German version first published in 1914, whose name translates roughly as “Don’t get annoyed.”
- American versions sold under several brand names from the late 1800s onward.
Ludo comes home to India
Ludo eventually returned to the country where its ancestor was born, and in India the English name stuck. Indian Ludo boards usually add a star-marked safe square in each quadrant, and house rules about sixes, captures and how many tokens must reach home vary from one family to the next.
The game moved to phones in the 2010s, and during the lockdowns of 2020 it became one of the ways families and friends kept playing together while apart. That fits its long history: Pachisi was always a social game, played in teams and argued over by everyone watching.
Ludo and Snakes and Ladders: two Indian games, one journey
Ludo is not the only Indian game that Victorian England borrowed and simplified. Snakes and Ladders began as a game about karma and liberation, then lost its moral squares and became a race for children. If you enjoyed this story, read the history of Snakes and Ladders next. The two games make a natural pair for younger players, and both appear in our list of family games.
Play Ludo today
Ludo still works the way it did in Victorian parlors: roll, move, capture, race home. You can play Ludo free on one phone, tablet or computer with two to four players, passing the device around the table. Computer players can fill any empty seats, so two people can still have a full four-color game. There is no sign-up and nothing to download, and once the page has loaded it works offline.
New to the game? The Ludo rules guide covers starting on a six, safe squares and the exact roll to finish, and the beginner’s Ludo tutorial explains when to capture and when to run for safety. For more games that seat a whole group, see our 4 player games.