Ludo Score Sheet

One game of Ludo is mostly dice. Five games is a tournament, and tournaments are where the better player actually wins. The problem is always the same: somebody has to keep score on the back of an envelope, and by game four nobody agrees what the total was. This does that part for you.

How to use it

Type in your players — two to eight. Pick a scoring system, record where everyone finished after each game, and the standings sort themselves. Players who sat a game out are simply left blank, which is what makes the rotations further down this page work.

Everything lives in your own browser. Close the tab, come back after dinner, and the scores are still there. Nothing is uploaded and nothing syncs between devices, so keep the tournament on one phone and pass it around.

Which scoring system to use

This is the decision that actually shapes your evening, and most groups pick the wrong one by default.

Winner takes all is the worst option for anything longer than three games. Ludo has enough variance that a player can be second in every single game and finish the tournament on zero. That is not a competition, it is a lottery with extra steps.

Finishing position is the sane default. It rewards being consistently near the front, which is exactly what skill produces in a game with this much dice noise. It is also the easiest to record — you already know who came where.

Tokens home is the one to use with children or a mixed group. It is the only system that scores progress rather than outcome. A seven-year-old who gets three tokens home and loses still puts three points on the board, and the evening does not turn into one adult winning everything. If you are playing Ludo as a family game, use this one.

Rotations for more than four players

A Ludo board seats four. The moment you have five or more people, somebody sits out every game, and if you improvise that rotation it will not be fair. These schedules are worked out so that it is.

Five players — five games

This one is perfectly balanced, and it is the nicest tournament size in Ludo. Run five games where each player sits out exactly once:

Every player gets exactly four games and one rest. Better still, every possible pair of players ends up at the same board exactly three times — the rotation is balanced not just in games played but in who you face. That falls out of the structure: a given pair only misses a game when one of them is the one sitting out, which happens twice across five games.

Six players — six games

Six is harder, because two people sit out each game and perfect pair balance is not achievable in a sensible number of games. This schedule gets as close as six games allow:

Every player plays exactly four games and rests twice. Pairings come out close to even — of the fifteen possible pairs, nine meet twice and six meet three times. That residual imbalance is unavoidable: six games provide thirty-six pair-meetings to spread across fifteen pairs, and thirty-six does not divide by fifteen. Anyone claiming a perfectly balanced six-player, six-game Ludo rotation has not checked the arithmetic.

Seven or eight players

At this size, stop rotating and start bracketing. With eight, run two tables of four simultaneously if you have two boards, take the top two from each into a final, and you have a complete tournament in three games worth of time. With seven, run two qualifying games (four players, then the remaining three plus one volunteer playing twice), then a final of the top four. Rotations at this size take all night and people drift away.

How long it actually takes

A four-player Classic game of Ludo runs about 20 to 30 minutes. That is not a guess: a token covers roughly 57 squares from yard to home, and the average move works out at about 4.1 squares per turn once you account for the extra roll on a six and the forfeit on three sixes. That is around fourteen turns per token, and captures push it up from there. We show the full derivation on the dice probability page.

Budget 25 minutes a game and you will not be far off. If that is more evening than you have, switch to Quick mode, where the first token home ends the game — it roughly halves everything above. The game modes guide covers the trade-off.

Breaking ties

Two players finishing level on points is common, especially under placement scoring. The tracker applies the standard order automatically: most wins first, then fewest games played.

Wins as the first tiebreak is the fair call — a player who won twice and came last twice has demonstrated more than one who came second in everything, even on equal points. Fewer games played as the second tiebreak matters in six- and eight-player rotations where someone ends up with an extra game: matching someone's points from fewer opportunities is the better performance.

If you have time, a decider game between the tied players settles it best of all. Agree before the tournament starts whether you are playing one, because arguing about it afterwards is how Ludo evenings end badly.

Agree the house rules before game one

Nearly every Ludo argument comes from an unstated rule, and in a tournament the stakes make it worse. Settle these five before you record a single score:

• Three sixes. Does the turn get forfeited? Most Indian households say yes. It also caps how far a token can travel in one turn, which changes capture odds.
• Exact roll to finish. Does a token need the precise number to enter home, or does an overshoot still count?
• Blocks. Can two of your tokens on one square stop opponents passing?
• Capture bonus. Some house rules grant an extra roll for a capture. It speeds games up considerably.
• What ends a game. All four tokens home, or the first player home while the rest keep playing for placement? Under placement scoring you need the second version.

Our complete rulebook covers each of these and the variations people play.

Frequently asked questions

Method note: the five-player rotation is balanced by construction — with one player excluded per game, any given pair is separated only in the two games where one of them sits out. The six-player schedule was checked by hand: all six players appear in exactly four of the six games, and pair meetings split nine-at-two and six-at-three across the fifteen pairs. Timings assume Classic mode at roughly 25 minutes per four-player game and will vary with how often captures happen.