Believed to be one of the oldest games in the world, chaupad is said to have undone
Traditionally, the game is traced to the epic Mahabharata in which the Pandavas lost their kingdom in a game of dice. The word ‘chaupad’ literally means ‘that which is composed of four boards’. In the 1860s it travelled to America where one John Hamilton popularised it as Parcheesi and to Europe, where a Munich-based games manufacturer, Josef Friedrich Schmidt, introduced it as Ludo in 1914.