About Count Ludo
Count Ludo is a free, ad-free Ludo game that runs in any modern web browser. Open the page, pick your seats, roll. There is no install, no account and nothing to download, and it keeps working offline once it has loaded.
Every other Ludo site seems to want something from you: an app install, a login, or your attention sold to ad networks before the board even loads. Count Ludo wants none of it. It is built and maintained by an independent developer, Karthik Subramanian, as an open-source project.
What you can do
- Play 2 to 4 players, mixing humans and bots in any combination.
- Choose easy, medium or hard bots per seat.
- Turn on blockades: two of your tokens on one square seal it so opponents cannot pass.
- Resume an unfinished game later; it is saved in your browser automatically.
- Switch between the light Daylight theme and the dark Midnight theme at any time.
- Track games played, wins, streaks and captures, stored only on your device.
The rules
- Pick 2, 3 or 4 seats on the home screen and make each one a human or a bot (easy, medium or hard).
- Roll the die. You need a 6 to move a token out of base onto your start square.
- Move one token forward by the number rolled. Land on an opponent outside a safe square to capture it and send it back to base.
- Rolling a 6 earns another roll, up to three in a row, so nobody can stall the table.
- Each token walks 56 steps from its start square, around the 52-cell track and up its private home column. Home entry needs the exact count.
- The first player to bring all four tokens home wins.
Safe squares
The four start squares and four star squares are safe: a token standing on one cannot be captured. On the 52-cell track these are cells 0, 8, 13, 21, 26, 34, 39 and 47.
Getting stuck
If no token can legally move with the number you rolled, your turn passes automatically, so the game never waits on an impossible move.
Are the dice fair?
Yes. Every roll comes from crypto.getRandomValues, the same randomness source browsers use for encryption keys, with rejection sampling so there is not even the tiny bias a naive modulo would add. No streak is nudged and no six is saved for later. There is no server that could tilt anything. Open the roll log during a game to watch every value land; the test suite also checks the distribution across sixty thousand rolls.
How it is built
Count Ludo is written in TypeScript with no framework and no runtime dependencies, about 10 KB of gzipped JavaScript. The board is SVG drawn from a 15 by 15 grid. The game engine is pure and fully unit tested. The site is hosted as static files on Cloudflare Pages. The source code is on GitHub under the MIT license.
Ludo descends from the ancient Indian game of Pachisi and is in the public domain. Count Ludo is an original, independent take with original board art and code, and no relation to any commercial Ludo product.