Snakes and Ladders
Tap the die and move that many squares. Land at the foot of a ladder and you climb it; land on a snake's head and you slide down to its tail. You need to land on a hundred exactly, so a roll that would take you past it walks up to a hundred and back down again. The first token home wins, and there is nothing else to decide.
The board and your turn
- A hundred squares. Square one is at the bottom left and the numbers run left to right, then right to left, all the way up to a hundred at the top.
- Two, three or four players, one token each. Every token starts off the board, so a first roll of three puts you on square three.
- On your turn you tap the die. That is the whole of your turn: there is nothing to choose and nothing to get wrong.
- Who rolls first comes from the game's seed, so it is not always the player who made the table.
Ladders and snakes
- There are nine ladders and nine snakes. Landing on the bottom of a ladder takes you to the top of it; landing on the head of a snake takes you down to its tail.
- They only work where you STOP. Passing over a ladder or a snake on your way does nothing at all.
- No ladder delivers you onto a snake and no snake drops you onto a ladder, so one turn is one climb or one slide and never both.
- The board is the same every game, and it is drawn on the page: you can see every snake before you roll into it.
How a game ends
- You have to land on a hundred exactly. A roll that would take you past it moves you up to a hundred and then back down by whatever is left over, so a five from ninety-seven leaves you on ninety-eight, and a six from there leaves you exactly where you were.
- The first token to land on a hundred wins and the match ends there. Everybody else is placed by the square they were standing on, and two players on the same square share a place.
- A resignation or a missed deadline ends the game against that player: their seat finishes last and the others keep the order their squares earned. Every move has the same deadline, chosen when the table is made.
Worth knowing before you start
- This game is decided by the dice and by nothing else. There is no skill in it, no decision to make and no way to play it better; the rating that moves when you win is measuring which way the dice fell.
- Every roll is worked out from the game's seed and the roll's number before anybody taps anything, and the seed is published when the game ends. So the dice cannot be changed by either side, and anybody can check every roll afterwards.
- The page never tells you what your next roll will be. There would be nothing to think about if it did, and a player who could see a snake coming would simply stop playing.
- The bot plays this game exactly as well as you do, because there is nothing to play. It is there so that a game can be had without waiting for somebody.
- A match is twenty-something turns each, so the short deadlines suit it: at a day a move the same match would take two months.
- The game comes from India, where it was Moksha Patam, a board about the vices and the virtues, and it has been printed under this name in Britain since the 1890s.
Nothing here is played for money and the site takes nothing. This is the traditional game and not any published edition of it: the board is the site's own, its nine ladders and nine snakes were chosen by measuring how long a match takes, and the length was tuned to twenty-something turns a player.
Snakes and Ladders terms
- A ladder
- Nine of them. Landing on the low end takes you to the high end, which is the only way to move more than six squares in a turn.
- A snake
- Nine of them. Landing on the head takes you down to the tail, and the long one costs fifty squares.
- The bounce
- What happens when a roll would take you past a hundred: you move up to a hundred and then back down by the rest of the roll.
- The seed
- The thirty-two random bytes every roll of the game is computed from. It is published when the game ends so the dice can be checked.