From Pachisi to Ludo: how an Indian court game became a boxed English one

Ahmed Moaz · 14 October 2026

The word pachisi comes from the Hindi for twenty-five, and the number is the clue to the whole story. It was the best throw you could make with six cowrie shells. The Ludo rules most of us learned are a later, simpler version of that game, with one die in place of the shells. What happened in between took centuries, and the record is patchier than the neat family tree suggests.

A name that means twenty-five

Pachisi was played on a cross-shaped board. Wikipedia's page on the game says the cross has a central square and four arms, each three columns wide and eight squares long. Players moved their pieces round the arms and back to the centre.

The dice were not dice at all. Players threw six cowrie shells, or seven in some versions, and scored the throw from how they landed. Wikipedia traces the name to the Hindi paccis, meaning twenty-five, the highest score six shells could give.

Compare that with the die in your hand today. A die tops out at six. A cowrie throw could be worth up to twenty-five, so the pace of the old game and the pace of Ludo feel different even though the shape of the journey is the same.

The court game, and how old it really is

Many pachisi histories start with the Mahabharata, the Sanskrit epic, which describes a famous dice gamble. It is tempting to call that game pachisi. The board-game historian Irving Finkel, quoted on the Wikipedia page, says the descriptions in the epic do not match the game and that the link is perhaps wrong. I would treat the Mahabharata story as a legend, not a date.

The firmer evidence is archaeological. Wikipedia reports that games of a chaupar type, a close relative with dice, have been identified from sites at Mathura and Noh dated to 1100 to 800 BC. Cross-shaped boards appear in reliefs at Chandraketugarh from the second or first century BC. A board identical to pachisi turns up in the Ellora caves, in about the sixth or seventh century. The page calls a link to the older game ashtapada plausible but unproven. So the honest summary is this: cross-and-circle dice games in India are very old, and the exact moment pachisi itself began is unknown.

The best-known picture comes from the Mughal court. The Wikipedia article quotes the French traveller Louis Rousselet, writing in the 1870s, who described the emperor Akbar playing on a court marked out in red and white squares, with sixteen young slaves from the harem, in the players' colours, standing in as pieces. He adds that Akbar is said to have had such a court built in all his palaces, with traces still visible at Agra and Allahabad. A photograph on the page shows a marked court at Fatehpur Sikri, where the squares can just be made out.

From six cowries to one die: what Ludo's rules kept

What do the rules we play now keep from that cross? The loop, mostly. A piece starts in a corner, travels the whole circuit and ends in the middle. Beyond that the details differ from board to board, so here is one modern set.

On the Ludo board Boardit plays, the shared track has 52 squares, and each colour has a private column of five squares leading to the centre. The centre also asks for the exact number. A piece that would overshoot simply cannot move, so you use the throw on another piece if you can. Wikipedia's pachisi page does not describe an exact-number finish, so I will not claim the old game had one.

The two games also differ in how long a throw can carry you. In the cowrie game a single throw could be worth up to twenty-five. With one die, nothing moves more than six squares at a time, and the game is a long accumulation of small steps. Anyone who has watched a Ludo table wait for a six to release a piece knows how much that changes the mood.

The one-die descendant is playable free at playboardit.com/play/ludo, on a site I build for visitors aged 13 or older.

Who invented Ludo? Three boxes for one game

Ludo's own name is Latin for "I play". Wikipedia's Ludo article says the game was marketed in England about 1896 by an inventor it names as Alfred Coller, who later patented it and sold it as Royal Ludo. The date is given as approximate and no patent date appears, so treat 1896 as a good estimate. The article also notes that Uckers, a game played in the Royal Navy, is based on Ludo.

The idea then crossed the North Sea. In the winter of 1907 to 1908, Josef Friedrich Schmidt of Amberg invented Mensch ärgere Dich nicht, which the Wikipedia page says was based on the English game. He dropped Ludo's tactical variations and kept the loop simple. The game was first published in 1910 and mass-produced from 1914.

In the United States, Wikipedia describes Parcheesi as a brand-name American adaptation of pachisi, published by E. G. Selchow and Company. The pages I read do not explain how the game travelled from India to England, and I would not invent a route. The Britannica entry could not be opened as a second source, so every date in this piece stands on Wikipedia alone.

The same loop now runs as Ludo online, and playing Ludo with friends in different countries is only the newest stop on a very long route. If a race around a cross could travel from a Mughal courtyard to a cardboard box and then to a screen, what else from the old game would you bring back?

By Boardit's maker, Ahmed Moaz.