Chess may be considered the game of kings, but Pachisi is the game of emperors. Long before the American game of Parcheesi was first played in the late 1860s, Pachisi, the Royal Game of India, had made its way around the world.
The date of Pachisi’s origin is clouded, and depends, in part, on which of the many related games you would consider to be Pachisi antecedents. A Mayan cousin dates back to the 7th century; an online source sites the first Pachisi game as being from the 4th century; and at least one noted historian, Stewart Culin, speculated that a similar game may have been devised many centuries B.C. What is known is that in the late 16th century, the Mogul (Mughal or Moghul) Emperor Akbar played a truly life-sized game of Pachisi, or, more precisely, a variation called Chaupar, on an outdoor board in his palace at Fatehpur Sikri, India. (Another historian, David Parlett reports that the related game of Chaupar is both more complex and more aristocratic than Pachisi.) The playing pieces were sixteen slave girls from his harem, moving as dictated by the royal players. The etched squares can still be seen there at the court of Fatehpur Sikri (the City of Victory), built by the Emperor Akbar in the 1570s and once the capital of the Mughal Empire.
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