Where Chowka Bara comes from

A chalk-drawn board, four cowrie shells, and whatever seeds were lying around. Chowka Bara has needed almost nothing to be played for a very long time. Here's what's actually known about its past, and what's speculation.

A very old family of games

Chowka Bara belongs to a family of board games sometimes called "cross-and-circle" games: a board shaped like a plus sign, tokens that race from a home corner around a loop and into the centre, and a randomizer (shells, dice, or seeds) that decides how far each token moves. Pachisi, Chaupar, and Ashte Kashte are the best-known relatives. Games in this family are attested across the Indian subcontinent for well over a thousand years, carved into temple floors and palace terraces in stone, long before anyone thought to sell them in a box.

The Mahabharata connection, and where it gets speculative

Chowka Bara is often mentioned alongside the Mahabharata, where the Pandava prince Yudhishthira famously gambles away his kingdom, his brothers, and his wife Draupadi in a dice game against the Kauravas. It's a genuinely old and important story about a board game changing the course of an epic. What's less certain is which specific game was being played. The Mahabharata's dice game is widely believed to be an ancestor of the cross-and-circle family, the same broad family Chowka Bara, Pachisi, and Chaupar all belong to. But there isn't solid textual or archaeological evidence that pins it down to the exact board and cowrie rules used in Chowka Bara today. Treat the connection as "same family tree, exact branch uncertain" rather than a settled fact. A game this old, played on boards drawn in chalk and erased after every match, was never going to leave a paper trail.

Not one invention, but a shared and evolving practice

Games like this rarely have a single inventor or a single origin point. What survives is a practice: a board shape and a scoring idea passed down by being played, region by region, household by household, with small variations creeping in wherever it travelled. That's the most likely reason Chowka Bara has so many regional names and near-relatives today: Ashta Chamma in Telugu-speaking Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, Daayam and Dayakattai in Tamil Nadu, Pakida and Kavidi Kali in Kerala, Thayam more broadly, each one a local dialect of the same underlying idea, some close enough to be the same game with a different name, others (like Tamil Nadu's dayakattai-dice version) developing into a genuinely distinct game over time.

Chalk, mud, and tamarind seeds

For most of its history, Chowka Bara hasn't needed a manufactured board at all. In villages and courtyards across Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Telangana, the board is still drawn fresh before each game: chalk on a concrete floor, a stick scratched into packed mud, or paint on a well-worn wooden plank kept specifically for this. Tokens are whatever's on hand: tamarind seeds dyed in a handful of colours, dried beans, small pebbles, or bottle caps. The cowrie shells themselves, small and curved and cheap, were common currency and household objects across coastal and southern India long before they were repurposed as dice, which is likely exactly why they ended up as the randomizer of choice: everyone already had a handful lying around.

That's also why the game has survived so well without any real "official" version. There's no manufacturer to standardize the board size or the rules, no rulebook printed once and left unchanged. A grandmother drawing the board from memory for her grandchildren is, in a real sense, the only publisher this game has ever had, which is exactly why a 5-house board and a 7-house board can both be "correct," and why the rules described on this site's rules page match one common tradition rather than a single universal law.

If you would rather not draw one, there is a free printable Chowka Bara board in both the 5-house and 7-house sizes.

Playing it today

Chowka Bara is still played on courtyard floors and verandas, especially during festivals and school holidays, but it's also increasingly played on phones and tablets, with the same rules, the same cowrie-shell scoring, just without the chalk dust. That's exactly what this site is for.