Set and match: Ludo meets chess in a new game called Squarace

Elements of two ancient Indian games, chess and ludo, have been blended to form a brand-new one — Squarace — in an unusual effort by a former ISRO engineer and a businessman, both from Indore.

It is both intriguing and a bit maddening to play, since the chess pieces move like chess pieces and require strategy and forethought, but the pace of play is determined by the die, which leaves that bit entirely up to chance.

The game is meant to be hours of fun for the whole family (up to four people can play), and users say it’s helping their children develop an interest in chess. But it all began with ludo.

During yet another lockdown last year, Ajitesh Sharma, 41, was watching his wife and son play ludo on their phones when he thought, ”What if I took two of India’s oldest games, still popular thousands of years on, and combined them?”

Sharma, a filmmaker who was formerly a mechanical engineer with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), reached out to a friend, printing and packaging businessman Dhirendra Rawat, 45, and together they got to work.

“Our first big challenge in combining the games was that they were so different. One runs on luck and the other is all about strategy and skill. Second, ludo moves in a linear direction, whereas chess pieces are more dynamic,” Sharma says.

It took four months of brainstorming with Rawat; Sharma’s wife Shilpa Sharma, 41, a fashion designer; and their son Atiksh Sharma, 15, to create a board game that was both fun to play and adequately represented the two root games.

Here’s how it goes: In Squarace, a player can only start when their roll of the die yields a one or a six. They then get to take one of their four pieces out of the home square. Each of these four pegs is a different chess piece: knight, rook, bishop and queen.

These pieces retain their ability to move as they would in chess: the bishop diagonally, the rook in straight lines, the knight in an L, the queen in any direction. But they can only move as many squares as the single die indicates.

The ludo grid has been altered to accommodate some of the movements of chess, with double lanes instead of single ones. Any time a player rolls a one or a six, they can opt to take another of their chess pieces out of the home square, if they think it will help defeat an opponent.

As in chess and ludo, an opponent’s piece is vanquished if another player’s lands on the same square; this piece must then return to its home square and start over. The game ends when all the pieces have crossed the finish line with an exact throw of the die.

Squarace was launched in March, priced at ₹1,199, with a launch offer of ₹800, and Sharma says 50 units have sold so far. The game won a silver in the entrant category at the US-based Muse Design Awards in 2021, and won in the board game / dexterity category at the NYX Game Awards, also based in the US.

“Unlike ludo, this is not a game of chance. The main challenge is in thinking ahead, and figuring out how best to use the pieces at hand,” says branding consultant Amit Koserwal, 42, who has been playing the boardgame with his 11-year-old son Ahaan.

IT project manager Avinash Tamrekar, 42, stumbled upon Squarace in March, while searching online for indoor games to play with his family. His daughter Adwita, 11, a fan of ludo is now a fan of the hybrid too, he says. “It’s acting as a gateway game to chess, because she’s started being curious about chess as well.”

Meanwhile, Sharma and Rawat are working on their second game, one that aims to teach children about banking and finance. “It involves dice but also has cards, tokens, a mechanical banking system and unique character-based pieces,” says Rawat. “The aim is to help children understand stocks, fixed deposits, cryptocurrencies and other financial and banking instruments.”

The idea is to explain the risk-and-reward ratio of these instruments, so that kids can become financially literate and think about investing from an early age, Sharma adds.