Parcheesi is a brand-name American adaptation of the Indian cross and circle board game Pachisi, published by Selchow & Righter [1] and Winning Moves Games USA.
Parcheesi is a brand-name American adaptation of the Indian cross and circle board game Pachisi, published by Selchow & Righter [1] and Winning Moves Games USA.
Parcheesi is typically played with two dice, four pieces per player and a gameboard with a track around the outside, four corner spaces and four home paths leading to a central end space. The most popular Parcheesi boards in America have 68 spaces around the edge of the board, 12 of which are darkened safe spaces. Each corner of the board contains one player's nest, or starting area .
A player rolls the dice and must use the topmost facing die pip values shown to move their pieces around the board in one of the following ways:
Games magazine included Parcheesi in their "Top 100 Games of 1980", praising it as a "classic chase game from India that has withstood the test of millennia". [6]
Games magazine included Parcheesi in their "Top 100 Games of 1981", describing it as "one of the easiest board games to learn and is perfectly suited for family play". [7]
Backgammon is a two-player board game played with counters and dice on tables boards. It is the most widespread Western member of the large family of tables games, whose ancestors date back nearly 5,000 years to the regions of Mesopotamia and Persia. The earliest record of backgammon itself dates to 17th-century England, being descended from the 16th-century game of Irish.
Ludo is a strategy board game for two to four players, in which the players race their four tokens from start to finish according to the rolls of a single die. Like other cross and circle games, Ludo is derived from the Indian game Pachisi. The game and its variations are popular in many countries and under various names.
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, with the number of shells resting with the aperture upward indicating the number of spaces to move.
Trouble is a board game in which players compete to be the first to send four pieces all the way around a board. It is based on a traditional game called "Frustration" played on a wooden board with indentations for marble playing pieces and rules similar to Parcheesi. Pieces are moved according to the roll of a die using a contained device called a "Pop-O-Matic".
Parqués is the Colombian version of a board game in the cross and circle family. The game is described as a "random thinking" game: the moves depend on the roll of the dice but players must consider possible strategies before executing their move. The objective of the game is to advance all the pieces to the end. Once in the safety zone player can use 2 dice until they are one space away from home, where they will then just use one die.
Parchís is a Spanish board game of the original from the Cross and Circle family. It is an adaptation of the Indian game Pachisi. Parchís was a very popular game in Spain at one point as well as in Europe and north Morocco - specifically Tangiers and Tetouan, and it is still popular especially among adults and seniors. Since it uses dice, Parchís is not usually regarded as an abstract strategy game like checkers or chess. It does not depend entirely on luck either, since the four pawns under a player's command demand some sort of strategy.
Sorry! is a board game that is based on the ancient Indian cross and circle game Pachisi. Players move their three or four pieces around the board, attempting to get all of their pieces "home" before any other player. Originally manufactured by W.H. Storey & Co in England and now by Hasbro, Sorry! is marketed for two to four players, ages 6 and up. The game title comes from the many ways in which a player can negate the progress of another, while issuing an apologetic "Sorry!"
Nard is an historical Persian tables game for two players that is sometimes considered ancestral to backgammon. It is still played today, albeit in a different form. As in other tables games, the playing pieces are moved around a board according to rolls of dice. It uses a standard tables board, but has a different opening layout and rules of play from that of backgammon.
Acey-deucey is a tables game, a family of board games that includes backgammon. Since World War I, it has been a favorite game of the United States Navy, Marine Corps, and Merchant Marine. Some evidence shows that it was played in the early 1900s aboard U.S. Navy ships. The game is believed to be rooted in the Middle East, Greece, or Turkey, where there were variants in which the game started with pieces off the board.
Dice chess can refer to a number of chess variants in which dice are used to alter gameplay; specifically that the moves available to each player are determined by rolling a pair of ordinary six-sided dice. There are many different variations of this form of dice chess. One of them is described here.
Plakoto (Πλακωτό) is a tables game for two players that is popular in Greece. The object is for the player to bring all 15 pieces around to his or her own home board and then bear them off. The player who bears off all 15 pieces first wins the game. This game is usually played along with two other variants, Févga and Pórtes. Together these three games are called Távli, and are played in sequence usually one after the other. Game is three, five or seven points. A Middle Eastern version of this game is Mahbusa, and the Bulgarian version of Plakoto is known as Tapa and also as Tsillitón (Τσιλλιτόν), in Cyprus. Parlett places Plakoto in the same group as the popular mediaeval game of English, as well as the French games of Tieste and Impérial, the Italian game of Testa and Spanish Emperador.
Aeroplane chess is a Chinese cross-and-circle board game similar to the Western game of Ludo and the Indian game of Pachisi. Developed in the 20th century, aeroplane chess features airplanes as pieces instead of the more abstract pawns and beehive-shaped pieces found in the games from which it is derived. Aeroplane chess has spread around the world, especially in Africa.
Aggravation is a board game for up to four players and later versions for up to six players, whose object is to be the first player to have all four playing pieces reach the player's home section of the board. The game's name comes from the action of capturing an opponent's piece by landing on its space, which is known as "aggravating". The name was coined by one of the creators, Louis Elaine, who did not always enjoy defeat.
Jacquet is a tables game played on a backgammon-like board and which was once very popular in France and several other parts of Europe. It probably emerged around 1800, but is attested by 1827. In the 20th century it replaced the classic French backgammon equivalent — the game of Trictrac — until Jacquet itself was superseded by Anglo-American games in the 1960s.
A number of related games under the Yahtzee brand have been produced. They all commonly use dice as the primary tool for game play, but all differ generally. As Yahtzee itself has been sold since 1954, the variants released over the years are more recent in comparison, with the oldest one, Triple Yahtzee, developed in 1972, eighteen years after the introduction of the parent game.
Headache is a board game in which two to four players take turns moving cone-shaped pieces around a board until one player succeeds in capturing every other piece on the board.
Dayakattai or Dayaboss is a Tamil dice game played by 2 or 4 people by forming teams. It originated in Tamil Nadu and is comparable to another dice game from the country called Pachisi. Dayakattai takes many different forms.
Hexagony is an abstract strategy board game for 2 to 6 players that was published as Bin'Fa by Taoist Arts Inc. in 1977, as Hexagony by Avalon Hill in 1980, and later re-released in a slightly modified form by Kenterprises as Bin'Fa.
The following is a glossary of terms used in tables games, essentially games played on a Backgammon-type board. Terms in this glossary should not be game-specific, but applicable to a range of tables games.
Long Nardy, also just Nardy, is a Russian tables game for two players. It is also played in Armenia as Long Nardi or Nardi. It probably originated in the historical Persian game of Nard. It requires a tables board, 15 men apiece and two dice.
To decide who goes first, players take turns throwing one die. The person with the lowest number begins, then play continues clockwise around the board.
