Teaching world history through a board game: a 50-minute Pachisi lesson plan

Ahmed Moaz · 15 October 2026

This 50-minute lesson uses one game, pachisi, to teach a hard idea in world history: sources often show where something started and where it ended up, but not the road between. Students handle three short source notes, practise source criticism, compare two rule sets, and write one claim the evidence supports and one it cannot. It suits learners aged 13 and over.

Why use a board game to teach world history?

A board game packs a culture's habits into a few rules, and rules are easy to compare. Pachisi, the Indian cross-and-circle race game, crossed into English, German and American boxes, so students can set four versions side by side and ask what each society changed and kept.

Before the lesson: sources and materials

You need six coins, a printout of the three source notes below, and a blank timeline strip. Each note is written from a Wikipedia article opened on 10 October 2026, and several of those pages carry warnings that are part of the lesson.

Note A, the old game. The name is the Hindi word for 25, the largest score that can be thrown with cowrie shells. Games of a close relative with dice are reported from Mathura and Noh, dated 1100 to 800 BC. Cross-shaped boards appear in reliefs from the second or first century BC. A pachisi board turns up at Ellora, about the sixth or seventh century. Irving Finkel doubts that the gamble in the Mahabharata was pachisi.
Note B, the court. A traveller, Louis Rousselet, described the emperor Akbar playing with sixteen young slaves from the harem, in the players' colours, as living pieces. Traces of large court boards can still be seen at Fatehpur Sikri, Agra and Allahabad.
Note C, the boxes. Ludo was marketed in England about 1896 and sold as Royal Ludo. A German game, Mensch ärgere Dich nicht, was invented in the winter of 1907 to 1908, first published in 1910 and mass-produced from 1914. In America, Parcheesi is a brand-name adaptation of pachisi.

The warnings: the Ludo article carries reference-quality tags, the Parcheesi article says it leans on primary sources, and one claim on the German game's page is tagged as failing verification. Ask students to find them. The Britannica entry could not be opened when this was written, so there is no second source; a stronger version of this lesson would add one.

The 50 minutes, block by block

0 to 5, hook. Ask who has played Ludo online, or Ludo with friends at home. Those students already know the modern Ludo rules and can serve as your reference. Then have pairs toss six coins ten times and tally the heads. Say that cowrie shells did this job, and that a single throw could be worth up to twenty-five.
5 to 20, three stations. Groups rotate through notes A, B and C and add one dated entry each to the timeline.
20 to 30, the gap. Ask: how did the game get from Akbar's court to a box in England? The notes do not say. Students write one hypothesis, such as trade or the colonial link, since British rule in India was in place in 1896. Mark it clearly as a guess to test, not a finding.
30 to 45, compare the rules. Give pairs the modern rule list: a six to release a piece, bonus throws for a six, a capture or a homecoming, protected pairs, and an exact throw to finish. Pairs list three differences from the cowrie game, such as the throw and the board, and check each against the notes. The Wikipedia page for the German game says its inventor removed Ludo's tactical variations, so students can also name one thing that was dropped.

To see one modern rule set in action, the table at playboardit.com/play/ludo plays the rules above; the site is not made for under-13s, and the lesson works on paper without it.

The exit ticket

Use the last five minutes for two sentences on a slip:

One claim the sources support, with the note it comes from.
One claim the sources cannot support, and what you would need to find out.

Mark the second sentence harder than the first. A student who writes "Ludo came to England by trade" has made a guess. A student who writes "the notes give a date for England but no route, so I would look for shipping records" has done the work of a historian.

What would your students guess the route was?

By Ahmed Moaz, who builds Boardit.