Ludo and Pachisi

Every household has it. The battered, glossy board that lives in a drawer with spare buttons, old batteries and other pieces no one knows where to put.

It’s pulled out when cousins arrive, when the lights go out, and loadshedding makes its appearance, when a Sunday refuses to end. Ludo on the front: four bright yellow, red, blue, and green corners; four small armies waiting at home. Flip it over and there it is again, Snakes and Ladders, moral geometry in a grid, one bad roll undoing minutes of progress.

The board is usually a little warped at the fold, having absorbed years of elbows, months of collecting dust. The corners become soft, curling into themselves with colours dulling at the edges marked with fingerprints of someone yet again flipping the board kyunke nahi aa raha chae, mei kya karun. Ammi taped the back once, ages ago; the tape has yellowed into permanence. You don’t notice it anymore.

The dice is either too small or missing. If it’s missing, the household produces a substitute with the seriousness of a rescue operation, borrowed from another game, scavenged from a pencil case, occasionally replaced with a phone app that everyone agrees is “not the same.”

And the ritual is always the same. The first argument happens before the first token moves. Who gets red? Who goes first? Yellow ki chauthi goti kahan hei? Does a six mean you get to start and get another turn? 

Before it was Ludo, it was a cross on cloth. The board we call “Ludo” is the streamlined descendant of older South Asian race games, most famously pachisi and its close relatives chaupar/chausar. Traditional pachisi is often described as “the game of twenty-five,” a reference to scoring and throws in older variants.

The track is already familiar: a cross-shaped board, movement by throws, and the central lesson that victory isn’t only speed, it’s timing. When to run. When to block. When to leave a token exposed because you’re tired of being careful, or have something more important, closer to home, to protect.

These games were not just the pastimes of the common man; they were courtly too. One of the most vivid traces is in the Mughal world: Emperor Akbar is famously associated with pachisi at Fatehpur Sikri, where a human-sized board, still visible in stone, turns play into architecture.

The story is often told with flourish, attendants as “pieces,” moves performed in a courtyard, but the surviving court itself is enough to make the point: a board game could be public, performative, even imperial, and then, slowly, it shrank.

The colonial pivot is when a home game became a product. So how did pachisi become the compact, mass-produced “Ludo” so many of us grew up with?

In the late nineteenth century, British manufacturers began standardising and packaging variants of these South Asian race games for sale. One key moment often cited is the patenting of a version called Royal Ludo by Alfred Collier in England in the 1890s, an era when a living tradition could be pressed into a tidy commercial form: fixed board design, fixed rules leaflets in English, fixed name, bright colours built for printing.

It’s a familiar shape: a game travels through the empire, becomes portable, becomes marketable and then settles into homes everywhere, including the very places it came from, now wearing a cleaner, standardised label. What survives across those shifts is the core pleasure: the race, the gamble, the brief electric joy of a six.

If you grew up with Ludo, you don’t remember learning it. You remember inheriting it. The tokens are scraping across the board. The dice rattling in a palm. The way adults pretend they don’t care and then care with frightening intensity. The quiet politics, alliances formed without speaking, vendettas declared with a smile, innocence performed while plotting: ke kis ki goti maarni hei ab.

Ludo looks simple because it uses simple tools. Some players are cautious, marching one token steadily home like a civil servant. Others scatter all four, chasing opportunity. Some guard safe squares like territory. Some play like the end is always near (it’s never really…)

How the game works (and why every house argues about it):

At its simplest, Ludo is a race game for 2–4 players.

• Each player has four tokens in a “home” corner.

• You roll a die and move along the track (usually clockwise), aiming to bring all four tokens into your coloured home column and then to the centre.

• Most versions require a six to bring a token out onto the board. Many house rules also give an extra turn for rolling a six.

• If you land on an opponent’s token, you typically send them back home (the great social reset).

• Certain squares are treated as safe, where tokens can’t be cut.

  
  

That’s the official skeleton. The rest is family law. In some houses, three sixes in a row cancel your turn. In others, it’s celebrated like fate chose you personally. In some, you must roll the exact number to enter the home. In others, overshooting is forgiven. The rules flex because Ludo isn’t only a board game, it’s a way households rehearse what they already are: strict, forgiving, chaotic, meticulous.

On the back of the boards that paired ladders (virtue) and snakes (vice) as a moral map. Where Ludo lets you believe skill can steady luck, Snakes and Ladders reminds you that luck can still pull the floor out from under you.

Two games, one board, two philosophies tucked into the same glossy rectangle, and maybe that is why the board survives every move, every house shift, every “we’re too old for this now.”

It survives because it is never really about the tokens. It is about what happens around them. Sit. Stay a while. Let’s play.