Ludo dice roller

How to use this Ludo dice roller

The roller is set up for a four-colour game. Each roll goes to the colour whose turn it is and, once it is done, the turn moves on by itself in this order: red, yellow, green and blue. If you roll a six, the turn stays with you and the page tells you to roll again. If you roll three sixes in a row, an alert appears so the table can apply the penalty.

1. Choose one die (standard Ludo) or two dice (for the versions that use a pair, common in South Asia).
2. Press Roll, or drag the die with your finger or mouse and release it over the tray. The die tumbles with real physics, so the result comes from the throw, not from a pre-set animation.
3. Check which colour is active before moving a token. If someone has skipped a go on the board, change the active colour before rolling.

The board and tokens are still your own. The page only replaces the die and the shaker, and it counts the turns and the sixes so nobody has to remember.

Ludo dice rules

Ludo has fewer dice rules than its Spanish and German cousins, but the ones it has decide most games. These are the rules found in standard British sets, with the most common house variations.

Rolling a six to start

All four tokens begin in the yard. A token can only enter the track, on its starting square, when you roll a 6. Until you do, your turn is a single roll and then play passes on. A token that is captured goes back to the yard and needs another 6 to come out again.

A six gives another roll

After a 6 you move (or bring a token out) and then roll again. A second 6 earns a further roll as well.

Three sixes in a row

The usual rule is that a third consecutive 6 is not played: you do not move with it and the turn passes straight to the next player. Some families play a harsher version in which the token moved with the earlier sixes is also sent back to the yard. Agree which one you use before you start, because it changes how risky a run of sixes is.

Exact roll to finish

Tokens go round the board and then up their own home column. Most rule sheets require the exact number to reach the centre; if the roll is too high, that token cannot use it and you have to move another one or lose the go.

One die or two

The British game uses a single die. In India and Pakistan, Ludo is often played with two dice, and some local rules let a token come out on a 1 as well as a 6. With two dice the chances change a lot, as the tables further down show.

Ludo and its relatives: Parchís, Mensch, Petits Chevaux

Ludo belongs to a family of race games played on a cross-shaped board. Each country fixed its own dice rules, which changes the pace of the game considerably.

The Spanish game adds rules that do not exist in Ludo: a token that captures another moves on 20 squares, a token that reaches home lets you move 10 squares with another, and two tokens of the same colour on one square form a blockade that nobody can pass. Spanish parchís also has a two-dice version in which doubles take the place of the 6.

Where Ludo comes from: from Pachisi to the English nursery

Ludo is a simplified form of Pachisi, a game from India closely related to Chaupar. Both use a cross-shaped board, usually embroidered cloth, with four arms of squares. The main difference was the source of chance: Pachisi was played with cowrie shells thrown by hand and scored by how many landed mouth up, while Chaupar, the courtly version, used long dice.

The name Pachisi comes from the Hindi word for twenty-five, the highest throw that the shells could give. The American trade name Parcheesi and the Spanish Parchís come from the same word.

The firmest evidence that the game existed in the 16th century comes from the court of the Mughal emperor Akbar. At Fatehpur Sikri a courtyard is laid out as a giant board, and tradition says Akbar played there with members of his court as the pieces. His chronicler Abul Fazl described the game with sixteen pieces, three dice and the cross-shaped board, and noted that it had long been played in Hindustan. Older carvings are sometimes said to show Chaupar, but they only show dice, so they cannot date the board.

From Patchesi to Ludo

The game reached England in the late 19th century. The games maker John Jaques registered the name Patchesi in 1887, and soon afterwards the game spread as Ludo, Latin for I play, with a British patent in the name of Alfred Collier that most histories of the game date to 1896. Collier also sold it as Royal Ludo. The decisive change was replacing the shells with a cubic die and a shaker, which the whole family still uses. The Royal Navy developed its own version, known as Uckers.

Germany, France and Spain

Josef Friedrich Schmidt designed Mensch ärgere dich nicht in Munich in 1907 and 1908 as a stripped-down Ludo. It went into series production in 1914 and became popular during the First World War, when Schmidt sent around 3,000 copies to military hospitals for wounded soldiers. In France the game took the shape of a horse race, the petits chevaux, which appear in department store catalogues in the late 1930s. In Spain it became parchís, with its own rules about coming out on a 5 and counting 20 after a capture.

Ludo dice odds

All figures are calculated for a fair six-sided die, where each number has a probability of 1/6. In Ludo the number you wait for at the start is the 6, so this table gives your chances of getting a token out within a given number of rolls.

With two dice

Playing with two dice nearly doubles the chance of getting out in a single turn compared with one die (30.56% against 16.67%), and if a 1 also counts it rises above one in two.

Practical tips