This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
At Fatehpur Sikri, the short lived capital the Mughal emperor Akbar built and then abandoned within two decades, a Pachisi board still marks the courtyard in stone, its cross shaped arms large enough to walk across. Court chronicles describe Akbar playing the game there not with carved pieces but with enslaved women from the harem, dressed in colors matching each of the four arms, moved across the giant board according to the throw of cowrie shells, turning a tabletop race game into a piece of court theater performed at human scale.
The stone board is the single most vivid piece of evidence for Pachisi as a courtly pastime, but it captures the game at one specific, spectacular moment rather than at its origin. The ordinary cloth board version, Chaupar, was almost certainly already old by Akbar's reign in the late sixteenth century, played on a much smaller and more portable scale by people with no palace to carve a board into.