How to play
Snakes and Ladders, known as Yılan Merdiven in Turkey, is a pure race. The board is numbered 1 to 100 starting at the bottom left, and the numbers zigzag: left to right along the first row, right to left along the second, and so on up to 100 at the top. Pick 2, 3 or 4 players from the Players buttons. You are red and the computer rolls for blue, green and yellow, in that order. Changing the number of players starts a new game.
Everyone begins off the board. When the status line says it’s your turn, tap the die. Your pawn hops forward one square at a time for the number you rolled, so younger players can count along. Then the board takes over:
- Ladder. End your move on the foot of a ladder and you climb straight to its top.
- Snake. End your move on a snake’s head and you slide down to its tail.
- Passing over a ladder or a snake does nothing. Only the square you stop on counts.
Two extra rules are switched on in this version:
A 6 earns another roll. The status line tells you to roll again. But if you roll three 6s in a row, your pawn goes back to the square where that turn began, wiping out anything you gained on the first two 6s, ladders included, and the die passes to the next player.
You must land on 100 exactly. If the roll is too big, your pawn walks up to 100 and back down by the leftover squares. A pawn on 97 that rolls a 5 counts 98, 99, 100, 99, 98.
The first pawn to stand on 100 wins. Several pawns can share a square; nobody gets knocked back.
This board
The layout is our own, with nine ladders and nine snakes:
| Ladders (foot to top) | Snakes (head to tail) |
|---|---|
| 3 → 22 | 25 → 5 |
| 8 → 30 | 34 → 12 |
| 17 → 45 | 48 → 19 |
| 28 → 55 | 57 → 38 |
| 37 → 59 | 62 → 41 |
| 50 → 69 | 74 → 53 |
| 63 → 81 | 88 → 67 |
| 71 → 92 | 93 → 73 |
| 80 → 96 | 98 → 79 |
The longest climb is the ladder from 17 to 45, a jump of 28 squares. The worst slide is the snake at 48, which drops you 29 squares to 19. The top of the board is a minefield: snakes wait on 88, 93 and 98, and the bounce rule can put you on one of them. From 99, a roll of 1 wins, but a roll of 2 bounces you back to 98 and down the snake to 79.
The odds
We ran 200,000 simulated games using exactly these rules and this board.
A single pawn needed about 40 turns on average to reach 100, counting each bonus roll after a 6 as part of the same turn. Half of all runs finished within 34 turns. About one in ten took 16 turns or fewer, and about one in ten dragged past 71. A typical run hit roughly six snakes and three or four ladders, and fewer than 8% of runs avoided every snake.
Going first helps, but only a little. In two-player games the first player won about 50.7% of the time. With four players the shares ran from about 26% for the first seat to 24% for the last. Over a whole game, the die erases almost all of that head start.
Strategy
There isn’t any, and that’s the point. Every move is decided by the die, nobody chooses anything, and the computer players follow exactly the same rules as you. That makes the game a fair contest between a parent and a four-year-old.
What the game does offer is a good way to practise counting. Count the hops out loud as the pawn moves, guess where it will land before tapping the die, and spot whether that square has a ladder or a snake on it. Older children can work out which roll would reach the next ladder, or which roll they hope to avoid near the top.
If you like dice races with a little more to decide, Kızma Birader lets you pick which pawn to move and send rivals home. For a family board game where every move is a choice, try Mangala.
If you enjoy Snakes and Ladders, try Tablut or Three Men’s Morris next.
