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History of Ludo

Ludo feels like a family game that has always been around, and in a sense it has. Its ancestor is a game played in India for well over a thousand years, and its modern form is a Victorian simplification of that game that went on to conquer the world twice, first on paper boards and later on phones.

The ancestor: Pachisi

Ludo comes from Pachisi, a cross-and-circle board game of India. The name comes from the Hindi word for twenty-five, the highest throw with the game's dice, which were cowrie shells. Players threw six or seven shells and counted the ones that landed mouth up. The board was a cross, traditionally embroidered on cloth, with a central square where the arms meet and where each player's pieces finished. Some squares, known as castle squares, protected a piece from capture. Four players took part, often as two teams.

How old the game is depends on whom you ask. A game called Pasha is described in the Mahabharata, but the historian of games Irving Finkel argues that its gambling game is probably not Pachisi. Finkel points instead to older cross-shaped boards and to chaupar, a close relative: boards in the shape of a cross appear in art from the 2nd and 1st centuries BC, and a board identical to the Pachisi layout is carved in the Ellora caves. Many popular accounts give a date in the sixth century CE or earlier, which cannot be checked. What is certain is that cross-and-circle racing games were played in India for a very long time before Ludo.

Akbar's living board

The best-known picture of Pachisi is the courtyard at Fatehpur Sikri, the city built by the Mughal emperor Akbar in the 1570s. A court laid out as a huge Pachisi board is still there, and accounts say Akbar played on it with young women from his harem serving as living pieces, moved according to the throws. Some historians think the existing court was built after Akbar's time, in the 17th century. Either way, it shows how seriously the game was taken at the highest level. Irving Finkel calls these large boards the earliest secure evidence for the game in India.

Ludo arrives in England

In the 19th century Pachisi reached Britain and America in adapted forms. In America the game was published as Parcheesi (see Ludo names and variants). In England, an inventor named Alfred Collier patented a simplified version and sold it as Royal Ludo. Sources disagree on the date: one account gives an application on 29 August 1891 and a patent granted that October, and another gives 1896, which is the date most often quoted in games encyclopedias.

The changes were simple and clever. The cowrie shells became an ordinary six-sided die, which any household already owned. The cloth board became a printed square board with a cross-shaped track and four corner yards, cheap to print and fold. The name is the Latin word ludo, "I play". The result was a game for families, with no need to explain scoring tables. It sold around the world on boards that carried the patent number.

Germany and the rest of Europe

Ludo crossed to Germany, where the toymaker Josef Friedrich Schmidt developed it into Mensch ärgere Dich nicht ("Man, don't get angry") in 1907 and 1908, published in 1910 and mass-produced from 1914. It became hugely popular during the First World War and is said to have sold about 70 million copies since. Meanwhile Spain developed Parchís, France petits chevaux, Sweden Fia, and Colombia Parqués. All of them share the Pachisi ancestor.

Ludo in South Asia

Although it was patented in England, Ludo found a second home in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, where it came back to the country its ancestor left. It is a familiar family game there, and the word Ludo needs no explanation. Regional house rules grew up: star squares, one die or two, strict exact finishes or forgiving ones.

Ludo goes digital

Mobile phones took the game to a new scale. Ludo King, made by Gametion in Navi Mumbai, appeared on the Apple App Store in February 2016, and by 2024 had passed one billion downloads on Google Play, the first Indian gaming app to do so. Others followed, including Ludo Star from Gameberry Labs. Online Ludo is now often played with live voice or video, which restores something that the early apps lost: hearing your cousin's reaction when you send their token home. That is exactly what LudoTalk is for. You can play Ludo online in a browser.

Snakes and Ladders, a cousin

Another Indian game made a similar journey. Moksha Patam, a moral game in which ladders stood for virtues and snakes for vices, reached England in the 19th century. An English version appeared in 1892, and the American Milton Bradley issued Chutes and Ladders in 1943. Like Ludo, it is a race decided by one die. LudoTalk includes Snakes and Ladders next to Ludo.

A short timeline

For how the game is played today, start with how to play Ludo.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Pachisi, Wikipedia
• Ludo, Wikipedia
• Fatehpur Sikri, Wikipedia
• How Pachisi, an Indian board game, became Ludo, Madras Courier
• Mensch ärgere Dich nicht, Wikipedia
• Ludo King, Wikipedia
• Snakes and ladders, Wikipedia

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