What Passa Game Is ?
Passa games are believed largely to have originated in India . Passa is mentioned in our Rig Veda, and also in the Buddha Game Listings; a list of games Great Buddha himself said he would not play. The oldest written reference of a dice game in India can be found in the Atharva Veda which is a known copy carbon dates to around 1300 BC. There have been other Indian Dice archaeological discoveries as well. Perhaps even the oldest references to Passa were included in both of India’s most ancient Sanskrit epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. In the Ramayana, trees losing their fruits are compared with a defeated Passa gambler who has lost his shirt. The core story of The Mahabharata has a king who gamble away his wealth and kingdom before eventually gambling his brother, himself, and his wife into servitude. Passa was a game in ancient Indian times where fortunes won and lost. Today, it’s merely a fun pastime offered in selected casinos including Casino Royale in Goa.
Indian Passa
Today the best known Dice games in India is Passa, the later referred to by those outside India as “Passa”.
To cope up history of India in gambling, before explaining these games further, neither Passa nor Indian Dice is likely to have been the game that Yudhisthira played against Kauravas for the northern kingdom of Hastinapura. It is far more likely they played the game as mentioned in Rig-Veda X-34-13 which was a game played with about 150 nuts from a tree called Vibhidaka. However Indians do have the Passa available to do so, as they were the inventors of modern dice, with copies having turned up from 3000 BC. With the history of Passa in India we just covered let’s look at how each of the two Indian dice games are played.
Passa Rules
How the game is played ?
- Each player makes a bet on either hare (loosing) or jeetae (winning).
- Once the bets are understood and placed a special set of passa are rolled until the winner is determined.
- These passa are rectangular in shape and use only numbers 1, 3, 4 and 6. Both passa are rolled together.
- If the outcome has no any of the pair, the passa are rolled again.
- As soon as a pair is rolled the outcome is decided. A pair of 4’s or 6’s are winning bets.
- A pair of 1’s or 3’s are winning Jeetae bets.
- Overall it’s rather a simple game similar to heads or tails, but more fun because passa are involved in it.
- Another game that has grown much more popular than Indian Dice is known as “Passa”.
- This game uses standard passa; 1s are wild, so 2’s are low, and 6’s are high.
- The object of the game is to make the highest number of matches as possible.
- 5 of a kind is the best hand, 4 of a kind is the second best, as followed by full house, trips, two pair and one pair.
- It’s basically similar to poker game except there are no straights or flushes in it.
