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Pachisi
EntityQ796171· pop 34· linked from 68 articles

Pachisi (, ) is a cross and circle board game that originated in Ancient India. It is described in the ancient text Mahabharata under the name of "Pasha". It is played on a board shaped like a symmetrical cross. A player's pieces move around the board based upon a throw of six or seven cowrie shells as lots, with the number of shells resting with the aperture upward indicating the number of spaces to move.

Key facts

Game.title
Pachisi
Game.italic title
no
Game.image_link
Pachisi-real.jpg
Game.image_caption
A game of Pachisi on a cloth board
Game.years
Ancient India to present
Game.players
2–4
Game.ages
4+
Game.setup_time
Negligible
Game.playing_time
30–60 minutes
Game.random_chance
Medium (dice rolling)
Game.skills
Strategy, tactics, counting, probability
Game.AKA
Twenty-Five

via Wikipedia infobox

Wikidata facts

Image
Pachisi-real.jpg
Show 3 more facts
on focus list of Wikimedia project
Wikipedia:Vital articles/Level/4
Commons category
Pachisi
Sources (1)

via Wikidata · CC0

~12 min read

Encyclopedic overview

10 sections
Contents
  • History
  • Players
  • Traditional equipment
  • Gameplay
  • See also
  • References
  • Citations
  • General bibliography
  • Further reading
  • External links

Pachisi (, ) is a cross and circle board game that originated in Ancient India. It is described in the ancient text Mahabharata under the name of "Pasha". It is played on a board shaped like a symmetrical cross. A player's pieces move around the board based upon a throw of six or seven cowrie shells as lots, with the number of shells resting with the aperture upward indicating the number of spaces to move.

The name of the game is derived from the Hindi word , meaning 'twenty-five', the largest score that can be thrown with the cowrie shells; thus this game is also known by the name Twenty-Five. There are other versions of this game where the largest score that can be thrown is thirty.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Pachisi” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

Gallery (8)