Ludo
Race all four of your tokens around the board and home before everyone else. Play with 2–4 players, people or computer.
Roll with Space, then click a glowing token or press its number 1–4. If only one token can move, it moves by itself. You can also tap your own corner to roll.
How to play
Each player has four tokens that start in their coloured corner, the yard. Players take turns to roll one die. The aim is to move all four tokens once around the board, clockwise, and then up your own coloured path into the home triangle in the middle. The first player with all four tokens home wins.
Rules
- Getting out: a token can leave the yard only on a roll of 6. It goes to your coloured start square.
- Rolling a 6 gives you another roll. Three 6s in a row and your turn ends without moving.
- Capturing: land exactly on a square with a single opponent token and it goes back to its yard. You get an extra roll for a capture.
- Safe squares: the four coloured start squares and the four star squares are safe. Tokens there can't be captured, and different colours can share them.
- Pairs: two tokens of the same colour on one square form a pair that can't be captured.
- Going home: after almost a full lap, a token turns into its own coloured home path, where nobody else can go. It needs the exact roll to reach home. Getting a token home also earns an extra roll.
- If you can't move any token with your roll, the turn passes.
Tips
- Get more than one token out early, so a single bad roll doesn't leave you stuck.
- Count the squares behind your tokens. An opponent 1 to 6 squares behind can capture you on their next roll, so a star square is often the best place to wait.
- Chase tokens that have gone a long way: sending a nearly finished token back to its yard costs its owner far more than capturing one that has just come out.
About the computer players
The computer looks at every token it could move and scores the result: capturing, getting home, leaving the yard, reaching a safe square, and how likely the opponents are to capture the token where it lands. Easy often just picks any token. Medium counts the threats. Hard works out the actual chance of being captured and also weighs how far each token has already travelled. The number of games you've won against the computer is saved in this browser.
History
Ludo is a simplified version of the Indian game Pachisi, which goes back many centuries and was played with cowrie shells instead of dice. The English version was patented in 1896 under the name Ludo, Latin for "I play". It has many relatives around the world, such as Parcheesi in the United States, Mensch ärgere Dich nicht in Germany and Parqués in Colombia, and became hugely popular again as a mobile game.