Games · Ludo
Ludo: how to play, win and settle the argument.
Ludo is a race game for two to four players, simple enough for a seven-year-old and tense enough for a whole family. Here is how it works, where the rules differ from house to house, and how to play it better.
Ludo in two minutes
Five things to know before the first roll.
Get a token out
Roll a 6 to move a token from your yard onto your start square. Roll again.
Run clockwise
Each roll moves one of your tokens that many squares around the ring.
Send others home
Land exactly on a lone opponent and their token goes back to the yard.
Turn up your column
After a full lap, your token climbs its own coloured column towards the centre.
Finish exactly
Land on the centre with the exact number. Bring all four tokens in to win.
That is the whole game. The rest is detail: which squares are safe, what a third 6 in a row does, whether you need the exact number to finish. The full rules page covers each of those and marks the ones that vary.
The guides
Pick the one you need.
- Rules →Setup, a turn, capturing, safe squares and the exact roll home, with classic and house rules in a clear table.
- Strategy →When to leave the yard, when to chase, how to use safe squares and how to count the endgame.
- Variants →Starting with a token out, team games, blockades, and how Ludo relates to Parcheesi and friends.
Where it comes from
An old game with a lot of cousins.
Ludo grew out of Pachisi, played in India for centuries on a cross-shaped cloth. It reached England in the 1890s as Ludo, the version most of the world now knows. Parcheesi, Sorry! and the German game Mensch ärgere dich nicht all share the same basic idea: race your tokens around a track and send your opponents' tokens back to the start.
Because the game has travelled so far, nobody agrees on every rule. The rules page lays out what is classic and what is a house rule, and the variants page covers the most common ways people change the game.
Questions
Quick answers
- How many people can play Ludo?
- Two to four. Each player takes one colour and four tokens. With two or three players, the unused corners stay empty and the board plays the same way.
- How long does a game of Ludo take?
- A four-player game on a real board usually takes between half an hour and an hour. Two players finish sooner, and house rules like starting with a token already out shorten it further.
- Is Ludo luck or skill?
- Both. The die decides how far you can move, and your choices decide which token moves, when to run and when to hunt. Over a few games the better planner tends to come out ahead, even if any single game can swing on a handful of rolls.
- Where does Ludo come from?
- Ludo is a simplified version of Pachisi, a cross-shaped race game from India, and it was sold in England as Ludo in the 1890s. Parcheesi, Sorry! and Mensch ärgere dich nicht are close relatives, with their own rules.