Red Banana Games

TraditionalIndian Games

Eleven old board games from across India. Play the computer, or a friend on the same phone.

Play nowSee the games

Free. Works offline. No sign-up.

The Indian Games app on a phone: Pick a game, with Pallanguzhi, Kuzhipparai and Bagh Chal, each with a Play buttonA game of Pallanguzhi on the 3D board, fourteen wooden pits with six seeds each
Indian Games Developed by Red Banana Tech Studio. The game picker, and Pallanguzhi on the 3D board

Pick a game

Tap a game to start playing straight away.

  1. Tamil Nadu and Kerala3D

    Pallanguzhi

    Sow handfuls round fourteen pits and capture beyond the gap

    Play
  2. South India

    Kuzhipparai

    Sow and relay round fourteen pits, then capture the pit opposite

    Play
  3. Nepal3D

    Bagh Chal

    Four tigers hunt twenty goats on a 5 by 5 grid

    Play
  4. South India

    Aadu Puli Attam

    Three tigers against fifteen goats on a triangular board

    Play
  5. Karnataka

    Navakankari

    Nine pieces each: form mills and capture, like nine men's morris

    Play
  6. India

    Chauka Bara

    Cowrie race: capture to spiral in to the centre

    Play
  7. India, on a cross shaped cloth board

    Chaupar and Pachisi

    Race your pieces round the cross board with dice or cowries

    Play
  8. Bihar

    Pretwa

    A war game on a wheel: leap to capture, down to three

    Play
  9. North India

    Gyan Chauper

    The snakes and ladders ancestor: climb to Moksha, a pure luck race

    Play
  10. Bengal and Bangladesh

    Sholo Gutti

    Sixteen soldiers a side: leap over rivals to capture

    Play
  11. India

    Mughal Pathan

    Leap to capture on a grid with a camp at each end

    Play
  12. Open the appWorks offline once opened. Settings stay on this device.

Pallanguzhi and Bagh Chal, now in realistic 3D

3D boards

Pallanguzhi on the 3D board in play: a carved wooden board, seeds sown round its pits and gathered in the two brass bowls
3DTamil Nadu and KeralaPallanguzhiSow handfuls round fourteen pits and capture beyond the gapPlay
Bagh Chal on the 3D board in play: bronze tigers among goats on a stone grid, one goat caught, sixteen still to place
3DNepalBagh ChalFour tigers hunt twenty goats on a 5 by 5 gridPlay

The 3D boards are built with free, open tools. More coming.

The cloth weave, glow and bokeh textures are drawn at run time in the browser. Cowrie shells, cups, bowls, trays and the boards' shapes are built in code at run time.

See who made them

How it works

Phone or computer

How to play Pallanguzhi, step 1 of 4: a picture of the board, a hand tapping a glowing pit, and the words Tap one of your glowing pits. You pick up all its seeds.
How to play Pallanguzhi, step 1 of 4

Tap Play, and a picture guide shows you how.

Pick a game and tap Play. You can play the computer or a friend.

Add it to your iPhone home screen

  1. Open indian-games.pages.dev in Safari on your iPhone.
  2. Tap the Share button (the square with an arrow, at the bottom of the screen).
  3. Scroll down and tap Add to Home Screen, then tap Add.
  4. Open Indian Games from your home screen. After the first visit it works with no internet.

On Android, open the browser menu and choose Install app or Add to Home screen.

No tracking, no account, works offline

Free

  • No tracking

    Nothing is tracked, nothing is sold, and there is no account to make.

  • Works offline

    After the first visit it works with no internet.

  • Made by Red Banana

    Everything the Indian Games app uses is either made by Red Banana or released under an open licence. Nothing is downloaded from another site.

About these games

These are real games with long histories, played on boards drawn in dust, scratched into temple floors and painted on cloth. Where the old rules are known, we kept them. Where nobody wrote them down, we made a fair version of our own, and the game tells you so. Each game links to the places we learned it from.

Games your grandparents played, now in your pocket.

Play now

More games coming.