The history of Ludo (Pachisi): from royal courts to your phone

2026-05-15 · 8 min read · by Asad Mahmood

The game you're playing on your phone tonight has a quiet 1,500-year history. It survived empires, crossed an ocean, got rebranded for Victorian drawing rooms, simplified for children, and ended up — through a long arc — as the most-downloaded board game on Earth. Calling it "Ludo" is technically accurate only for the last 130 years. The game itself is much older. This is the real version of how it got here.

The Indian original: Pachisi

The oldest documented ancestor is Pachisi (sometimes spelled "Pachisee" in colonial sources) — a cross-and-circle board game played on a cloth or wooden cruciform board, with four players in teams of two, six or seven cowrie shells used as dice. The name comes from the Hindi pachīs, meaning twenty-five, which was the maximum throw with the cowrie set (five shells landing mouth-up).

The earliest physical references to Pachisi appear in 6th-century Indian temple carvings — surviving examples at the Ellora Caves in Maharashtra — and in literary texts going back to the Mahabharata's account of chaupar (or chausar), Pachisi's sibling that uses long four-sided dice instead of cowries.

Akbar's life-sized board at Fatehpur Sikri

The most famous historical reference, and the one most often cited, sits in the courtyard of Fatehpur Sikri, the Mughal capital built by Emperor Akbar in the 1570s. There, between the Diwan-i-Khas and the Anup Talao pool, is a giant Pachisi board cut into the stone of the courtyard itself. The squares measure several feet across.

Akbar, according to the Mughal court chronicles compiled by Abu'l-Fazl, played the game with sixteen courtesans of his palace as the playing pieces — the women themselves stood on the squares and moved according to the throws. The chronicles describe games sometimes running for hours, with the emperor watching from a raised platform. Whether the Abu'l-Fazl account is literal history or romanticised court flattery is debated by historians, but the board is unambiguously there, in the stone, in 2026. You can stand on it.

"The most curious of all the Akbar-era gaming arrangements is the great pavement-board of pachisi at Fatehpur Sikri, where Akbar caused his palace women to act as the pieces on the squares." — Encyclopædia Britannica, entry on Pachisi

The British rebrand: Ludo, 1896

Pachisi travelled to Britain with the East India Company in the 18th and 19th centuries, where it was played in informal sets and described in travel literature. Then, in 1896, an English engineer named Alfred Collier filed British Patent No. 14,636, registering a simplified version of Pachisi under the new name Ludo — from the Latin verb meaning "I play". The same year, a near-identical patent (No. 21,228) registered "Royal Ludo" with a slight rule variation.

The simplifications Collier introduced are the ones we still play with today:

• Six-sided dice replace cowries. Cowrie-shell scoring is hard to teach. A standard cubical die produces a value 1-6, simpler arithmetic, faster turns.
• No team play. Pachisi was a partners game — red plus black against yellow plus green. Ludo dropped partnerships; each player plays for themselves.
• Fewer "safe" squares. Pachisi had a complex safe-square / fortress logic. Ludo kept a small number of starred safe squares and dropped the rest.
• Four tokens per player. Pachisi sometimes used three; Ludo standardised four.
• "Six rolls again." The bonus-turn-on-six rule — and the requirement to roll a six to bring a token out of base — appears to be a Ludo invention, not in classical Pachisi.

The Royal Navy adopted a variant called Uckers, played on the same board with house rules; the Spanish-Mexican family produced Parchís on a slightly different twenty-cell board. All three games — Ludo, Uckers, Parchís — share the same Pachisi ancestor. The English-language word "Ludo" is the one that stuck for the simplified four-player variant.

What changed when it went digital

The leap from board to phone happened in the late 2000s with Flash-based browser games, but the breakout was 2016, when Gametion Technologies released the original Ludo King app. By May 2020, during the Covid lockdowns, the game had passed 100 million downloads. As of 2026 it sits in the 1B+ install band on Google Play — the only Ludo title in that tier. We covered the modern app landscape in the 2026 Ludo app roundup.

What's interesting is what didn't survive the digital jump. Three quiet changes:

1. Cowries are gone. Every digital Ludo I'm aware of uses a six-sided die. The original probabilistic curve of the cowrie roll — where 25 was a rare maximum and 1 was common — is lost. The dice distribution on a cube is flatter.
2. "Safe squares" are inconsistent. Ludo King uses one safe-square model, Parchisi STAR uses the Spanish twenty-cell version, and our own Game Night uses the standard Indian Pachisi-derived ruleset with starred squares at the four entry-track openings. There's no canonical online rule, which means players occasionally argue about what is and isn't a fortress.
3. The board is square, not cruciform-in-cloth. Ludo's board is a fixed 15×15 grid baked into the digital UI. The original Pachisi board was a cross-shaped cloth, often hand-embroidered, where each player's home arm could be visually distinct. The cloth is gone; the abstraction stays.

Why this matters when you tap "Roll"

The next time you open a Ludo board on a phone, you're playing a sixteen-hundred-year-old game in its fourth or fifth major rule revision, on a 15×15 grid that Akbar's court would not have recognised but the basic mechanic of which they would have understood in one round. The dice still decide. The race-to-home is still the point. The cousin who rolls three sixes in a row still gets to gloat.

For more on how Ludo plays on the four big modern Android apps, see the 2026 Ludo roundup. For why playing it over Bluetooth instead of online actually fits the original "everyone in one room" character of Pachisi, see Bluetooth multiplayer on Android, explained.

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Sources

• Wikipedia, "Pachisi" (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachisi) — comprehensive entry on the parent game, including the Fatehpur Sikri court reference.
• Wikipedia, "Ludo (board game)" (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludo_(board_game)) — entry on the 1896 patent and the rule simplifications.
• Encyclopædia Britannica, "Pachisi" (britannica.com/topic/pachisi) — historical context on the Mughal-era game and its courtly play.
• UK Intellectual Property Office, British Patent No. 14,636 (1896), Alfred Collier — registration of "Ludo" under simplified rules. Searchable on Espacenet (worldwide.espacenet.com).
• Victoria and Albert Museum, South Asia collection (vam.ac.uk/collections) — searchable archive of 19th-century cloth Pachisi boards from Hyderabad and Lucknow.
• Abu'l-Fazl ibn Mubarak, Akbarnama (translated by H. Beveridge, 1907) — primary Mughal court chronicle including the Fatehpur Sikri pavement-board account.