Ludo

Ludo is a strategy board game for 2-4 players. In it, players race their four tokens from start to finish according to the rolls of a single dice. Like other cross games and circle games, Ludo is taken from the Indian game Pachisi. The game and its different versions are popular in many countries and under different names.

One of the first editions of Ludo.

Ludo is active since its invention date, 1896. Its genres are board game, race game and dice game. The maximum time the game can be played is 90 minutes. The Ludo game that we now play was invented by Alfred Collier from England.

History

The Mahabharata

Pachisi was created in India in the sixth century CE. The latest evidence of this game's evolution in India is the depiction of boards on the caves of Ellora. The original version is also described in the Indian epic Mahabharata in which Shakuni uses cursed dice to beat the Pandavas, and at last after losing everything, Yudhisthira puts his wife Draupadi on stake and loses her, too. The Pandavas get all their belongings back, though, after Draupadi vows to curse the whole Kuru family, but stops at the intervention of Gandhari, and seeing an opportunity to still Draupadi's anger, Kuru king Dhritarashtra promises to give back to the Pandavas all that they had lost in the game.

It was also known as Chaupar in ancient times. The contemporary version was played by the Mughal emperors of India; A notable example is Akbar.

Pachisi was changed to use a cubic die with a die cup and patented as "Ludo" in England in 1896. The Royal Navy took Ludo and converted it into the board game Uckers.

Ludo Board

An original real Ludo Board.

Special areas of the Ludo board are normally coloured bright yellow, bright green, bright red, and bright blue. Each player is given a colour to play and gets four tokens in the colour the player is given. The board is normally a square with a cross-shaped playspace, with each arm of the cross having three columns of squares, usually six per column. The middle columns usually have five squares coloured; these represent a player's home column. A sixth coloured square not on the home column is a player's starting square. At the centre of the board is a large finishing square, often composed of coloured triangles on top of the players' home columns (thus depicting "arrows" pointing to the finish).