Ashtapada

Ashtapada, also called Ashtapadi, is a very old Indian race and escape board game played on an eight by eight board whose squares are marked in certain places with safe points. The name is a Sanskrit word for the eight-square board itself. Players use a die to move their pieces around the board and then into the centre, and the Ludii record gives a two-player ruleset in which one side plays black and the other red. The board predates chess in India, and it is widely believed that the same marked board was later taken over for the strategy game chaturanga, whose boards in India often still carry the Ashtapada markings even though they mean nothing in chess. A thirteenth century Sanskrit work, the Ashtapabada of Balabharata, describes a dice game played on the Ashtapada.