Ludo

The board and how you win

Seats are fixed: you are always the bottom seat. CPU 1 sits to your left, CPU 2 sits across from you, and CPU 3 sits to your right — all 3 play at whichever difficulty you picked. There is no 2-player or 3-player mode; every match uses the full 4 seats.

The board is a 15×15 grid — plain DOM squares, not a canvas. A single 52-square track runs around the board and is shared by all 4 colors; each color turns off into its own 6-square home stretch before the finish, and every player starts with 4 pawns waiting in the yard.

• The match ends the moment any player gets all 4 pawns home — nobody plays on to see who comes 2nd, 3rd or 4th.
• No clock is shown while you play; the time is kept only for your statistics.
• There is no daily match, no level list and no streak — you just choose a difficulty each time you start.
• Only a match that actually finishes counts as a win or a loss. A match you leave partway through, and the rare one that reaches the 10,000-throw cap with nobody home, are both recorded as played but count as neither.

Rolling, moving and capturing

You always roll first — that is fixed, not chosen by seed. A 6 lets a pawn leave the yard for your own starting square, and after you move on a 6, you get another roll right away. 3 sixes in a row is different: the 3rd one voids that roll, nothing moves, and the turn passes on.

Any roll moves a pawn already on the track, or already in a home stretch, forward that many squares — a 6 just adds leaving the yard as one more option. Coming home takes an exact count — a roll that would overshoot leaves that pawn where it is, unmoved. If no pawn can legally move on a given roll, the game passes automatically for you; a 6 that goes unused this way still earns its extra roll, since what a 6 buys is a throw, not a move.

• Landing on a square with enemy pawns sends every one of their pawns there straight back to their own yard — not just one of them, however many are stacked.
• Capturing never earns you an extra roll. The only thing that does is rolling a 6.
• 8 squares are safe from capture: the 4 starting squares, plus a star square 8 spaces further along the track for each color. Pawns of different colors can share a safe square, and nothing is captured there.
• Stacking 2 or more of your own pawns on one square is legal, and it does nothing. It does not block anyone and does not protect them. If an enemy lands there, the whole stack goes home together, so a pile of your pawns is a bigger target, not a fort.
• Dice are seeded to the match: the same seed always produces the same sequence of rolls, all 6 faces are equally likely, and no seat’s rolls come from a different draw than any other’s.

This pair of rules — stacking that protects nothing, and capturing that pays out only in pawns sent home, never in an extra roll — is a deliberate departure from most mainstream Ludo implementations. There, same-color pawns stacked together usually act as a blockade, and a capture usually earns another throw. This game leaves blockades out entirely, and stacking without protection plus capturing without a bonus roll both follow from that one choice.

Controls

On your turn, tap the die to roll it. If you have a legal move, the pawns that can be moved are highlighted; tap one to move it forward by the number you rolled — the roll decides the distance, so there is no separate step for choosing where to land. If nothing can legally move, an automatic-pass notice appears and play continues, whether that means your own extra roll or the next CPU’s turn.

• There is no time pressure anywhere in a turn — take as long as you like before rolling, and again before picking a pawn.
• When 2 or more of your own pawns share a square, they are drawn slightly apart so each one is still an individual target, and the tap area for each pawn is made larger than the square itself so they stay easy to hit on a small screen.
• Tapping anything else does nothing and makes no sound.

Easy, Normal and Hard

There are 3 opponents, and every CPU seat plays at whichever one you picked — all 3 can be chosen from the first launch, and none is unlocked by playing or paying. None of them searches ahead; every decision is a plain calculation over that roll’s legal moves.

Ties are broken by a single random draw from the match’s own seed rather than by anything about which pawn was rolled last, so the same position always breaks the same way for a given seed.

• Easy picks any one of that roll’s legal moves at random.
• Normal always prefers, in this order: a capture, then reaching the finish, then leaving the yard, then landing on a safe square, and only then plain forward progress. Among captures, sending back more pawns at once outranks sending back fewer.
• Hard uses that same order of preference, then subtracts an estimate of how likely the resulting square is to be captured back on the next turn — an estimate, not a lookahead, since seeing a chain of 6s coming would mean searching, and this CPU does not.

That capture-risk estimate treats 3 squares as perfectly safe outright — a safe square, your own home stretch, and the finish — because no enemy pawn can physically reach any of them. Everywhere else it is worked out per seat and combined, not simply added up: 2 opponents that could each reach a square on 1 die face do not add to a 2-in-6 chance, they combine to a slightly higher one, because each rolls independently.

Help — seeing which pawns can move, and nothing more

This game has no Undo and no Hint. Undo cannot work in either direction here: winding the board back while keeping the same roll would let you see a future roll before it happens, and re-rolling instead would break the promise that the same seed always plays out the same way — neither one survives contact with dice that are seeded, not random.

What it gives you instead is simpler: the only pawns you can tap are the ones with a legal move for the roll you just made. Everything else just sits there, and tapping it does nothing.

• This is the rule made visible, not advice — it shows what is legal, never which legal move is better.
• It works from the first launch, costs nothing, and no game feature is ever behind an ad or a purchase.

Tips

• A 6 is worth thinking about, not just taking: with a pawn still in the yard, you are choosing between bringing a new one out and pushing one that is already moving, and once several of your pawns are out, that choice comes up often.
• Because a capture never buys an extra roll here, getting caught costs less than in versions where it also hands the attacker another throw — so spreading the risk across several pawns is cheaper than it looks.
• Since stacking protects nothing, keep your pawns apart rather than parking 2 together — a shared square is one roll away from losing both at once.
• The 8 safe squares — 4 starting squares and 4 stars — are the only places you can sit still without risk; when you have the choice, land a pawn on one rather than just anywhere.
• 3 sixes in a row void the third roll only: it moves nothing and the turn passes, while the moves your first 2 sixes made all stand — so do not plan around a streak of them bailing you out.
• Near the finish, remember an overshoot roll just sits unused — keeping more than 1 pawn in range of home gives you a legal move more often when the exact number does not come up.

Hard’s risk estimate is exactly that — an estimate, not a search. It cannot see a chain of 6s coming, so it will not always find the safest square when a chain is what actually matters, and it is not trying to be unbeatable.

Questions people ask