Classic board games every Pakistani family knows
A surprising number of the world's most-played board games were invented in the part of the world we now call Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. Chess, Snakes & Ladders, Ludo, Parcheesi — all of them. The Western names came later; the games are old enough that Akbar played the local versions and the Mahabharata uses one of them as a major plot device. Here are six classic board games every Pakistani family has either played or watched a grandparent play, with their South Asian names, actual origins, and modern phone-screen counterparts.
1. Pachisi — the cross-and-circle race
The granddaddy of the modern Ludo board. Pachisi (from Hindi pachīs, "twenty-five") is a four-player race game on a cruciform cloth board, originally played with six or seven cowrie shells as dice rather than a cube. The shells are dropped together; the number landing mouth-up is the player's roll. Twenty-five is the rare maximum.
The earliest physical evidence is in 6th-century temple carvings at the Ellora Caves. The most famous reference is the life-sized stone Pachisi board cut into the courtyard of Akbar's Fatehpur Sikri palace in the 1570s — the emperor reportedly used courtesans as playing pieces, standing on the squares as dice were thrown.
Modern descendant: Ludo. The 1896 British patent by Alfred Collier simplified the partnership rules, swapped cowries for a d6, and renamed it from Latin "ludo" ("I play"). See the Ludo board or the history of Ludo / Pachisi.
2. Carrom — the flick-and-strike disc game
Carrom is the wooden-board flick game found on every uncle's verandah from Karachi to Kerala. Players take turns flicking a heavier striker disc at smaller carrom-men, trying to pocket them into the four corner pockets. Indian and Pakistani household versions vary in rule but converge on the same physics.
The origin is disputed — early-20th-century Indian palaces, or earlier South Asian roots with possible Portuguese influence via Goa. The International Carrom Federation, founded in Chennai in 1988, sets modern competitive rules.
Modern descendant: Carrom Pool by Miniclip (over 500M Play Store installs as of 2026) and a few others. We don't ship Carrom in Game Night, but the physics-feel translates surprisingly well to touch.
3. Chausar (Chaupar) — the Mahabharata's gambling game
Chausar or chaupar is Pachisi's older, harsher sibling. It uses three long four-sided pasa dice (sticks rather than cubes), and the rules are more punishing — captures are guaranteed, partnerships are mandatory, and stakes were traditionally real money or land.
Its most famous appearance is in the Mahabharata, where Duryodhana invites Yudhishthira to a game of chausar. The Pandavas lose everything — kingdom, wealth, and Queen Draupadi — across one rigged session. That game sets up the rest of the epic; the Bhagavad Gita itself is a side-effect of the war that started at that dice table.
Modern descendant: Pachisi and Ludo. Chausar itself is largely a museum-and-festival game now.
4. Chaturanga — the ancestor of every chess on Earth
Chaturanga (Sanskrit, "four divisions") is the 6th-century North Indian game that became chess. The four divisions are infantry, cavalry, elephants and chariots — which became pawns, knights, bishops and rooks in the Persian shatranj that traveled west to Europe. The king and minister (later "queen") were already there.
The earliest references appear in Subandhu's Vasavadatta (6th–7th c. CE) and Bana's Harshacharita. The game spread along the Silk Road to Persia in the 7th century, becoming shatranj. The 8×8 board and the four-piece-class structure are straight Chaturanga.
Modern descendant: Every chess app on every platform. Chess.com alone has over 100M members as of 2026. Modern engines like Stockfish descend from a game your grandparents could have explained with twigs on the floor.
"Chess, in its earliest form, is one of the few human inventions where the physical evidence and the textual record both point to a single subcontinental origin — North India, between the 5th and 7th centuries CE." — The British Museum, History of Chess collection notes
5. Moksha Patam — the original Snakes & Ladders
This one is a quiet shock to most people: Snakes & Ladders is a Hindu and Jain moral teaching game from medieval India. The original name is Moksha Patam (also spelled Mokshapatam, Moksha Patamu) — "the path of liberation." The ladders represent virtues (kindness, faith, knowledge) that accelerate the soul's journey toward moksha. The snakes represent vices (anger, theft, drunkenness, lust) that send the soul back down the board.
The 13th-century version coded morality: ladders at virtue squares, snakes at vice squares, and more snakes than ladders by design — the lesson being that liberation is harder than the fall. The British took the game home in the late 1800s, stripped the moral coding, and sold it to Victorian children as pure luck.
Modern descendant: Snakes & Ladders as a free-tier filler in dozens of apps. The moral original survives in Indian temple displays and Jain pilgrimage centres.
6. Hopscotch — the street game (Stapu / Kit-kit / Pittho)
Strictly speaking this is a chalk-on-pavement game, not a board game — but every Pakistani family knows the rules. Called stapu, kit-kit, chindro or pittho depending on the region, it's the game of throwing a small flat stone onto a chalk-drawn grid and hopping single-foot through the squares to retrieve it.
The grid varies by city but the structure — single-leg hops, double-leg rest squares, a thrown marker — is consistent across South Asia and shares ancestry with the Roman scotch. The game survives because the equipment cost is zero.
Modern descendant: No serious digital version. Still played in Pakistani schools, but increasingly less. Worth teaching your kids while there's pavement.
How the six map to modern apps
| Classic game | Origin era | Modern digital form |
|---|---|---|
| Pachisi | 6th century CE (Ellora Caves) | Ludo apps (Ludo King, Game Night, Parchisi STAR) |
| Carrom | Early 20th century (disputed) | Carrom Pool, Carrom Disc Pool |
| Chausar | Mahabharata era (~5th–4th c. BCE textually) | Pachisi/Ludo serves as proxy |
| Chaturanga | 6th century CE, North India | Chess.com, Lichess, every chess engine |
| Moksha Patam | 13th century, India | Snakes & Ladders apps |
| Hopscotch / Stapu | Pre-modern, Roman parallel | None notable; physical only |
Why we digitised one of them
Game Night ships Ludo (the Pachisi descendant) because it's the one game from this list that translates cleanly to a phone without losing the social character. Carrom needs the physical feel of the striker; Chausar needs the long sticks and the partnership tension; Chaturanga's modern descendant (chess) has a dozen great apps already. Pachisi was the gap. The Ludo board in Game Night uses the Pachisi-era safe-square ruleset, four-pawn race format, and the original cross-shape track packed into a 15×15 grid. For where it sits next to the other modern Ludo apps, see the 2026 Ludo app roundup. For the long history of how Pachisi became Ludo, see the Pachisi history piece.
Play the digitised one
Solo vs AI, Pass & Play with cousins, Bluetooth with the room or online via a six-letter code. Free.
Sources
- Wikipedia, "Pachisi" (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachisi) — earliest references and Fatehpur Sikri court board.
- Wikipedia, "Chaupar" (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaupar) — Mahabharata dice game and three-stick variant.
- Wikipedia, "Chaturanga" (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaturanga) — Sanskrit textual references and the four-divisions piece structure.
- Wikipedia, "Snakes and Ladders" (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snakes_and_Ladders) — Moksha Patam origin, virtue/vice mapping and British adoption.
- Wikipedia, "Carrom" (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrom) — origin dispute and modern federation rules.
- The British Museum, "History of chess" collection (britishmuseum.org/collection/term/x12005) — North-Indian origin of Chaturanga and migration route via Persia.
- Encyclopædia Britannica, "Pachisi" (britannica.com/topic/pachisi) — cross-references between the classical South Asian games.
- Victoria and Albert Museum, South Asia collection (vam.ac.uk/collections) — searchable archive of 19th-century cloth Pachisi boards and Moksha Patam scrolls.