This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
When British administrators and travelers encountered Pachisi in colonial India, they brought home a game that demanded cowrie shells, a large cloth or painted board and a working knowledge of a scoring system built around specific throw combinations. What reached English living rooms in 1896 as the patented game Ludo had shed almost all of that: ordinary dice replaced the shells, the board shrank to a size that fit on a table, and the scoring quirks that rewarded skilled shell reading were dropped in favor of a simple race to home.
The American adaptation Parcheesi took a different path through the same commercial pressures, and an earlier one: Selchow and Righter trademarked it in the United States in 1874, twenty two years before Ludo's 1896 English patent, not after it. Both commercial versions kept the four player, cross shaped race structure that makes Pachisi recognizable at a glance, which is why the family resemblance survives even though a modern Ludo player would find the original cowrie shell scoring genuinely unfamiliar.
Sources The Oxford History of Board Games with Wikipedia, Selchow and Righter