How to Play Ludo Dash
Ludo is one of the most played board games in the world, descended from the ancient Indian game Pachisi. Each player controls four tokens of one colour, all starting in their home base. The goal is to move all four around the board and into your home column before anyone else does.
Ludo Dash is local pass-and-play for up to four colours, so everyone shares one screen and takes turns.
Controls
Tap Roll to throw the dice. If you have a legal move, the tokens you can move are highlighted — tap one to move it. If no move is possible, play passes to the next colour.
The rules
- You need a 6 to bring a token out of base
- Rolling a 6 also earns you an extra roll
- Landing on a square occupied by a rival token captures it and sends it back to base
- Star squares are safe — tokens there cannot be captured
- A token must travel the full loop and then up its own coloured home column
- You need an exact roll to enter the final home square
The six is worth more than it looks
A six does two things at once: it releases a token from base and it grants another roll. That means a six is effectively two turns, and it is the only way new tokens enter play at all.
The consequence is that early game Ludo is largely a waiting game, and the player who gets tokens out first gains a compounding advantage — not because those tokens are ahead, but because having more tokens on the board means more of their future rolls will have a useful move available.
Keep several tokens active
This is the most important strategic idea in Ludo and the one casual players most often miss. If you only have one token on the board, every single roll must be spent on it, whether that move is good or not. You have no choices, which means you cannot respond to anything.
With three or four tokens active, a roll of 3 becomes a decision: advance the leader, escape a threatened token, or move something onto a star. Options are the resource, and tokens on the board are how you buy them.
Count six squares behind you
A token is in danger from any rival within six squares behind it, because that is the maximum a single roll can travel. This gives you a concrete, checkable safety rule rather than a vague sense of risk.
Before ending your turn, look behind each of your tokens. If a rival sits one to six squares back and your token is not on a star, you are gambling. Sometimes that gamble is correct — but it should be a decision, not an oversight.
Capturing is usually worth it
Sending a rival token back to base costs them everything that token had travelled, and forces them to roll a six all over again to re-enter. That is often twenty or thirty squares of progress plus an unknown wait.
Compared to advancing your own token by a few squares, a capture is almost always the better play. The main exception is late in the game when you are close to winning and the detour to capture would cost you the race.
Star squares are staging posts
Safe squares are not just places you happen to land. Good players aim for them, especially when travelling through the stretch of board where rivals are entering or clustering. Treat them as checkpoints: move star to star when under threat, and take riskier open ground when the board behind you is clear.
The endgame
Once tokens start entering home columns, spreading your rolls evenly across four tokens becomes a mistake. Tokens in the home column are safe and no longer contested, so the priority shifts to getting each one there rather than keeping a balanced advance.
Concentrate on the token nearest home, finish it, and move to the next. You also need an exact roll to land on the final square, so a token sitting two from home can only use a 2 — worth remembering before you waste a small roll elsewhere.
A game of chance and judgement
Ludo is often dismissed as pure luck, and the dice genuinely dominate any single game. Over many games, though, the players who keep tokens spread, use safe squares deliberately and take captures consistently win more often. The dice decide what options you get; you decide what to do with them.
Plays on any device
Ludo Dash runs in your browser using HTML5 and works on phones, tablets, laptops and desktops. Nothing to install, no signup, and it supports pass-and-play for up to four people on one device.
