Why good deeds on the ladders?

Snakes and ladders began as a game with a lesson in it. On the old Indian boards the squares were named for good and bad qualities, so a ladder lifted you for a virtue and a snake took you down for a fault. We kept that idea and made it small and everyday. Each ladder here is a good deed, like sharing your snacks or helping carry the groceries. Each snake is a slip, like grabbing the last kuih or breaking a promise.

Nobody gets told off. The dice decide where you land, so a snake is only bad luck, and our snakes smile all the way down.

There are four boards to collect: a Garden, a Kampung, a Hawker Centre and a Rainforest. Each opens when you reach the top of the one before it. The later boards have more snakes and take longer.

A bit of real snakes and ladders history

The game comes from India, where it had several names. Gyan chaupar means the game of knowledge. Moksha patam is named after moksha, the freedom from the cycle of rebirth. In parts of South India it is called paramapada sopanam, the steps to the highest place.

Each square on an old board was named for a quality or a state of being. One board, drawn in Lucknow around 1780 for a British official called Richard Johnson, is now in the British Library. Its 72 squares are labelled in Persian and Hindi with words such as heaven, grief and bad company. Jain boards often had 84 squares, with the soul climbing towards liberation at the top. There were Hindu and Sufi boards as well, and many had more snakes than ladders.

How old the game is, nobody knows for sure. A story often repeated says the Marathi poet-saint Dnyaneshwar made it in the 1200s. That story goes back to a book printed in 1871, and the boards that can be dated with confidence are far later. The Johnson board is one of the oldest.

The game reached Britain in the late 1800s. In 1892 a London maker, F. H. Ayres, registered a design for a round board with a spiral of 100 squares, and one survives at the Young V&A in London. Early English boards kept the lesson, with Victorian virtues at the foot of the ladders. By the middle of the 1900s the words had mostly gone, leaving the plain race of luck most people know today.

How to play our version

• Moving: roll the dice and move that many squares. Everyone starts below square 1. The numbers run left to right along the bottom row, then right to left on the next, snaking up the board.
• Ladders and snakes: stop at the foot of a ladder and you climb it. Stop on a snake’s head and you slide to its tail. Passing over them on the way does nothing.
• Winning: the first to the top square wins. The game carries on until every person playing has reached the top, so everyone finishes.
• Exact finish: this is off to start, and a roll that goes past the top square still gets you there. Turn it on and you need the exact number. Roll too high and you stay where you are.

Some families give an extra turn for a 6, or make you bounce back from the top on a roll that is too high. We kept it simple and left both out.

Tips

There is no strategy, and that is the point. Every move comes from the dice, so a small child and a grandparent have exactly the same chance.

Start small. For young children, pick a 36-square board and leave counting help on. Each square lights up with a number as the piece moves, so they can count the hops out loud.

Know how long it takes. We ran each board thousands of times in a computer simulation. One player needs about 7 or 8 rolls on average to finish the small Garden board, and about 20 rolls on the 100-square Garden. The 100-square Rainforest takes about 30. Exact finish adds 4 or 5 rolls to a game on any of the 100-square boards.

Your turn

The Garden board is laid out at the top of this page and the Otter is waiting. Roll the dice.