How to play Ludo online with friends: private rooms, voice chat and clubs

The quickest way to play Ludo online with friends in Ludo Vest is a private room: host one from Home, send the code, and start once someone has joined. Everyone seated can talk over voice chat while they play, and nobody who was not invited can take a seat. That covers most evenings. For the rest there is Team Up with a partner, a club that works as a permanent hangout, and offline mode for when the Wi-Fi is the problem.

This guide walks through each of the four, with the exact rules the server enforces, so you know what happens when somebody drops out, leaves early or cannot find the code.

The four ways to play with people you know

How to host a private Ludo room

A private room is the ordinary Ludo Vest table with a six-character code on it. Nothing is created until you say so: the screen opens on a setup card, and the room only exists once you tap Host Match.

1. 1Open a private room from Home. It is the Team Up Friends card on the home screen.
2. 2Pick a rule set. Classic, Arrow, Blitz or Master, or Team Up. The rules of each are in the variations guide.
3. 3Pick a table size. 2, 3 or 4 players. Team Up is always four.
4. 4Tap Host Match. Only now is there a room and a code to copy or share.
5. 5Invite your friends. Share the code, or pick accepted friends from your friend list and they get an invite straight away, as a push notification if the app is closed.
6. 6Tap Start Match. The button appears for the host once at least one other person has joined. You can start before every seat is filled.

The table size you choose is the room's capacity, not a quorum. Host a four-seat room, wait for two friends, get bored of waiting for the third, and you can start with three. The match is then settled as a three-player match. Team Up is the exception: it needs all four seats, because it is two pairs.

Three-seat tables exist only in private rooms. Matchmaking offers two and four seats, because a bucket of three would split the public queue. If three of you want to play without a stranger or a bot in the fourth chair, a private room is the only way.

Rules that are different in a private room

• It ends the moment anybody leaves. On a public table the others play on without a leaver; in a private room the match simply ends. Among friends that is usually what you want.
• It awards no league points. Private, casual and club tables never count toward leagues. Only public ranked matches do, so nobody can farm the ladder against a friend.
• An unstarted room expires after 15 minutes. Every seat is told the room closed, and the code stops working. Host a fresh one.
• The dice are the same. A private room commits to its dice the same way every other match does. More on that below.

Adding friends from the table

Most friend lists start at a table. During a match, tap an opponent's face to open their card and choose Add as Friend. They accept or decline; a decline is "not now" rather than a block, so you can ask again later. Both of you get a notification: the in-app banner when you are online, a push when you are not.

You can also add someone by their seven-digit player ID, which sits beside every name. Names in Ludo Vest do not have to be unique, so the ID is what a request, an invite or a report actually resolves against. If you signed in with Facebook, the app can also show your Facebook friends who already play; that list only ever contains people who have authorised the app themselves.

Once a request is accepted, that friend shows up in the invite list of your next private room. Invites from the friend list go only to accepted friends. Anyone else is skipped with a reason rather than failing the whole invite.

Ludo with voice chat at the table

Every match is a voice room in its own right. The people seated at a 2-player, 4-player or Team Up table can talk while they play, whether or not a club is involved. Tap the microphone on the board to go live, and a ring lights up on the seat of whoever is speaking.

• Only the seats can hear. The voice room is capped at the match seats. Matches have no spectators, so there is no way for an outsider to listen in.
• Bots have no voice. A matchmaking bot, a seat a bot has covered and a player who has left are all outside the voice room. A player who merely dropped their connection is heard again the moment they rejoin.
• Muting is yours. Muting yourself is local, and you can mute any other player just for you.
• Audio runs on our own server. Voice is relayed live through a voice server Ludo Vest runs itself, never through a third-party service, and it is not recorded. The game server only tracks who holds a seat and who is speaking.

Team Up: Ludo 2v2 with a partner

Team Up is the closest Ludo gets to a doubles match. Four seats, two teams, and your partner is the player sitting opposite you. It is a seating rather than a rule set, so it pairs with Classic, Master, Blitz or Arrow and keeps that variation's rules and clock.

• Teammates never capture each other and share squares freely.
• A partner whose four tokens are all home keeps their turn and rolls for the other's tokens.
• The team wins when all eight of its tokens are home (in Blitz, the first token home), and the pair split the prize.

Two friends can host a Team Up private room and invite another pair. Two friends can also queue for Team Up online, and matchmaking waits until four real players have joined: Team Up never fills with bots. Offline, Team Up works on one phone too.

Clubs: a standing room for your group

A private room is for one evening. A club is for a group that plays every week. It is a live room with ten mic seats, a chat feed, gifts and its own tables, and it keeps its members, levels and Club ID from one session to the next. The Clubs page has the overview; the clubs guide has every number.

• Walk in as a guest. Anyone can enter a club, watch the room and listen to the mic. Chat is for members.
• Join for 69 Hearts. Membership makes you a Member at once, with no request to approve, and you can belong to any number of clubs.
• Mic seats belong to the managers. The Owner, Super Admins and Admins take a free seat themselves; members and guests sit when a manager taps Invite to Mic on their card.
• Club tables are free. A table hosted inside a club never stakes Gold. The only thing a club game can spend is Hearts, and only for an undo.
• More than Ludo. Managers can host Ludo, Jackaroo for two or four, and Dominos for two. Any member can watch from the spectator gallery.
• One voice for both rooms. If you play at your club's table while holding a club mic seat, the club mic and the game mic are one: mute in either and it changes in both.

Hosting a club table needs an Admin or above, and table invitations reach only members who are in the club room at that moment. That keeps a club game a club game: nobody outside the club is pinged, and nobody who has gone to bed is either. Founding your own club costs 2,000 Gold, and an account owns one club at a time.

Ludo offline with friends on one phone

No signal, a long drive, or a grandparent without a smartphone: offline mode is pass-and-play on one device. Pick Classic, Arrow, Blitz or Master for two or four seats, or four in pairs with Team Up, type a name for each person and start. Leave a name empty and a bot takes that seat, so three people can still play a four-seat board.

Offline mode runs the same rules as the server. There is no stake and nothing to win, and nobody needs an account. If you want the full rules before the first game, the complete Ludo rules guide starts from the beginning.

Fair dice, even among friends

Friends accuse each other of luck more than strangers do. In Ludo Vest the argument has an answer. Before the first roll the server publishes a SHA-256 commitment to a secret seed, every roll is derived from that seed, and the seed is revealed when the match ends. Anyone at the table can recompute the rolls and check them against the commitment.

Nothing a player owns reaches the dice. The generator takes the match seed and the roll index and nothing else, so the friend with the expensive dice skin is rolling exactly the same odds as you. The Fair Play page has the short version and the verification walkthrough has the code.

Troubleshooting: codes, disconnects and busy seats

• "The code does not work." A room that was never started closes after 15 minutes, and a room whose host cancelled or walked out is closed too. Ask for a fresh code.
• "It says I am already in a match." One table per player. You cannot sit at a private room while you are still seated at another table that has not ended. Finish or leave that one first.
• "My friend dropped out." A seat is held for 60 seconds, and reconnecting restores the exact board. In a private room, a player who is gone for good ends the match for everyone.
• "Someone keeps guessing our code." Joining by code is limited to ten attempts a minute per account, which makes guessing a six-character code impractical.
• "The room is full." A room refuses a seat past the size the host chose. Host a bigger table next time; Team Up is always four.
• "The game is playing my turns." You sat idle for a full turn clock, so your seat went on auto play. Tap AUTO on your seat to take it back.

Anything else goes to support, where a person reads it. And if you have not installed the game yet, the download page says where it is available today.