Tradition · board game
Pachīsī / Ludo
Also known as Pachisi, Ludo, Parcheesi, Pachīsī — the ancestor of Ludo
A race game for two to four players on a cross-shaped board, the pieces moved home by throws of six or seven cowrie shells and the whole game named for twenty-five, paccīs, the highest throw. Akbar is remembered playing it on courtyards laid out as boards, with women of the harem as the pieces. It was marketed in England in 1896 as Ludo, with a single die in place of the cowries, and became Parcheesi in America and Mensch ärgere Dich nicht in Germany.
- Function
- Arts & performance
- Confidence
- Not assessed
Worth knowing
Alfred Coller sold his patented version as Royal Ludo, from the Latin for “I play”, and the Royal Navy took it to sea as Uckers. India kept the older game alongside it: chaupar is played on the same cross, with three long four-sided dice in place of the cowries.
How old it is remains open. Games like it are reported from Painted Grey Ware sites at Mathura and Noh (1100–800 BCE), cross-shaped boards appear on reliefs at Chandraketugarh in the second and first centuries BCE, and the dice match of the Mahabharata is often assumed to have been pachisi. Irving Finkel thinks that last assumption probably mistaken, and counts the Mughal courtyard boards as the earliest secure evidence for the game in India.
Connections (5)
- Court associationAkbar
Akbar is the emperor the game is remembered with. Louis Rousselet, writing in 1876, said Akbar played pachisi on a court laid out in red and white squares, with sixteen young slaves from the harem in the players’ colours as the pieces, and that such courts could still be seen at Agra and Allahabad. Whether or not he played it quite like that, Mughal boards of this kind are, in Irving Finkel’s judgement, the earliest secure evidence for the game in India.
- Located atFatehpur Sīkrī
A courtyard in the palace complex at Fatehpur Sikri, the city Akbar built from 1571, is marked out in squares as a pachisi board big enough for people to stand in as the pieces — the Pachisi Court. It is the kind of board Rousselet described, and it gives a game with no fixed address a place on the map: the Mughal boards are the oldest that can be tied to pachisi for certain.
- TransmissionLondon
Britain is where pachisi turned into Ludo. Alfred Coller marketed it in England in 1896 and later patented it as British patent 14636, selling it as Royal Ludo: the cross-shaped track kept, the cowrie shells replaced by a single cubic die, the name taken from the Latin for “I play”. The Royal Navy took it to sea as Uckers, and the game came back to India under its English name, so that the Ludo board sold in Indian shops today is pachisi returned by way of England.
- AnalogueChaturaṅga / Chess
The other Indian board game the world plays under a foreign name. Chaturanga left by way of the Sasanian court in the sixth century and was renamed at each stop — chatrang, shatranj, chess; pachisi left by way of British India in the nineteenth and became Ludo in England, Parcheesi in America and Mensch ärgere Dich nicht in Germany. One is a war game of capture and the other a race home round a cross, and both left India without their names.
- Traditional linkMahabharata
The dice match in which Yudhishthira stakes and loses his kingdom, his brothers, himself and Draupadi to Shakuni is often said to have been pachisi, and pachisi is sometimes described as the epic’s game under the name pasha. Irving Finkel thinks the identification probably mistaken. It stays on the map because it is how the game is remembered in India, and because the doubt is part of the story: the oldest boards that are certainly pachisi are Mughal.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Pachisi” and “Ludo”. Irving Finkel, “Round and Round the Houses”, in Asian Games (2004); R.C. Bell, Board and Table Games from Many Civilizations (1979); Louis Rousselet (1876), quoted in Edward Falkener, Games Ancient and Oriental (1892).
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