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Continental

Ludo

Ludo is played across the continent — in Nigerian sitting rooms, Egyptian cafés and Ghanaian courtyards — but it reached Africa from India by way of Britain, descended from the far older game of pachisi. It is included as something widely played rather than as something African in origin.

— The board

Play against the machine. Your best score is kept in this browser only — nothing is sent to the archive.

Click or tap to play. Keyboard works too where the game uses it.

— What is playing against you

Four rules in order. It never scores anything, and takes the first token that fits.

Follows a fixed list of rules ludo-engine.ts — aiPlay()

Turns on a panel over the board listing the moves the machine considered on its last turn, the score it gave each one, and how many positions it examined to get there. The numbers are the engine's own.

The simplest opponent here, and worth comparing with Oware's search. 1. Can any token capture? Play it. 2. Can any token enter the board? Play it. 3. Can any token reach home? Play it. 4. Otherwise, move one at random. There is no evaluation function and no lookahead. Note also that within each rule it takes the FIRST matching token in the list, not the best one — if two tokens could capture, it does not consider which capture is worth more. Ludo is mostly dice anyway, which is the real lesson: the amount of intelligence worth building into an opponent depends on how much the game rewards it.

Compare every opponent in the archive →

What this version is not

A four-player race with three computer opponents. House rules for Ludo vary enormously — whether a six is needed to enter, whether captures are compulsory, whether stacking is allowed — and only one set is implemented here. The board colours are the only thing about this version that is African.

— Sources

No sources have been attached to this entry yet. Until they are, treat everything above as provisional.

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