Games and sports facts for kids

Chess began in India about 1,500 years ago as chaturanga. Its pieces stood for an army: foot soldiers, horses, elephants and chariots.

Snakes and ladders began in India as Moksha Patam. The ladders were good deeds and the snakes were bad ones.

Ludo comes from India’s Pachisi. At Fatehpur Sikri there is a giant Pachisi board laid out in a courtyard, from Emperor Akbar’s time.

Kabaddi and kho-kho are India’s own sports. India won both the men’s and the women’s titles at the first Kho Kho World Cup, in New Delhi in 2025.

A Rubik’s Cube can be mixed up in more than 43 quintillion ways (43 followed by 18 zeros!), yet any mix can be solved in 20 moves or fewer.

Sudoku has a Japanese name, but the puzzle was first printed in the USA in 1979, as “Number Place”.

If both players play tic-tac-toe perfectly, the game always ends in a draw.

India’s men’s hockey team has won 8 Olympic gold medals, more than any other country.

The hockey wizard Major Dhyan Chand was born on 29 August, so that is India’s National Sports Day.

Sachin Tendulkar is the only player to score 100 international centuries in cricket.

India’s men won the Cricket World Cup in 1983 and 2011, and India’s women won their first World Cup in 2025.

Abhinav Bindra won India’s first individual Olympic gold medal, for shooting, in 2008.

Neeraj Chopra won the javelin gold at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, India’s first Olympic gold in athletics.

Viswanathan Anand became India’s first chess grandmaster in 1988. In 2024, Gukesh D became the youngest undisputed world chess champion ever, at 18.