The History of Ludo
A modern, mass-produced descendant of one of India's oldest board games.
Pachisi, the Royal Game of India
Ludo's direct ancestor is Pachisi, a cross-and-circle race game played in India for many centuries. Pachisi is traditionally associated with Indian royal courts - the Mughal emperor Akbar (1542-1605) is famously said to have played a life-size version on a huge red-and-white marble courtyard at his palace in Fatehpur Sikri, using courtiers and enslaved women dressed in colored costumes as the living playing pieces. As with many such colorful legends, the precise details are difficult to verify at this distance, but the courtyard itself still stands.
Traditional Pachisi wasn't played with a die at all: instead, players threw six or seven cowry shells and counted how many landed opening-side up, an early form of randomizer used across much of South Asia.
A Victorian Patent Turns It Into Ludo
In the late 19th century, British colonists in India brought Pachisi-style games home and adapted them for mass production. The simplified version played today - a single six-sided die in place of cowry shells, and a fixed set of rules rather than regional variations - was patented in England in 1896 under the name "Ludo," from the Latin ludo, "I play."
Ludo quickly became a staple of the Victorian and Edwardian games cupboard, cheap to print and easy to learn, and it has stayed a mainstay of family game nights across Europe and Asia ever since.
One Game, Many Names
Ludo's success spawned close relatives worldwide. In the United States, Parcheesi - trademarked in 1874, actually just before Ludo itself - offered its own Americanized take on Pachisi, with its own board conventions and capture rules. The English board game Sorry!, first published in the 1930s, borrowed Ludo's core race-and-capture idea and layered card-drawn moves and extra special squares on top.
Today Ludo is played from the school playground to the smartphone app store, its cross-shaped board and four home-colored corners still instantly recognizable more than a century after that first English patent - and many centuries after Akbar's courtiers first stood in for its pieces.