Chutes and Ladders Online — Free, No Download

What people actually want from Chutes and Ladders

Both names describe a race with no decisions in it, and that is the whole appeal rather than a shortcoming. It descends from Moksha Patam, an Indian game used to teach children that virtue carries you upward and vice drops you back, which is why the ladders and the snakes were never symmetrical in the original — there were more snakes than ladders, and the point was moral rather than fair. What survives is a game a very young child and an adult can play as genuine equals, because neither of them can play it well. That is rarer than it sounds, and it is why this is usually the first board game anybody owns. What people want from an online version is exactly that, without a box, and with relatives who are not in the room.

What Snakes & Ladders does instead

It runs in a browser with a five-character room code, so two to four people join from wherever they are on whatever device they are holding — no app, and guests never make an account. The board here keeps the older naming: nine ladders and ten snakes across a hundred squares, drawn rather than photographed, with the snakes as snakes. A game takes about fifteen minutes, and because there is nothing to learn, a table can start playing within seconds of the code arriving. That matters most for the audience this game actually has, which is often a grandparent and a small child in different countries.

What it is not

It is not the Hasbro board and uses none of its artwork, its slides, its characters or the good-deed illustrations that version puts on the squares. Those pictures are a real part of what that edition is for — they carry the moral lesson the modern American version keeps — and none of them are here. The snakes are snakes. If what you want is specifically the boxed Chutes and Ladders your children recognise, buy it; this is the same race under its older name, free, in a browser.

Side by side

How Snakes & Ladders plays

Snakes and Ladders is the purest luck game most people ever play, and that is the point of it rather than a flaw. It began as the Indian game Moksha Patam, a moral lesson where ladders were virtues and snakes were vices, and arrived in Britain in the 1890s with the morality quietly removed. There are no decisions in it. You throw, you move, and the board does whatever it was always going to do — which makes it the one game at a table where a six-year-old and an adult are exactly evenly matched, and the only board game where losing is genuinely nobody’s fault.

Full Snakes & Ladders rules, setup and common questions →

Common questions

Is Chutes and Ladders the same as Snakes and Ladders?

Yes. It is one game with two names. Milton Bradley published it in the United States in 1943 as Chutes and Ladders, replacing the snakes with playground slides; everywhere else it kept the older name and the snakes. The rules, the hundred squares and the single die are identical.

Why were the snakes changed to slides?

Because a snake is frightening to a small child and a slide is not, and the American edition was aimed squarely at very young players. The change also fit the illustrated good deeds and misdeeds that version puts on its squares, a softer form of the moral lesson the game has carried since it was Moksha Patam.

Is it suitable for very young children?

It is close to the only board game that genuinely is. There are no decisions, so a four-year-old and an adult are exactly equal and both can tell that they are. It also finishes in about fifteen minutes, which is roughly the attention available.

Can a grandparent play it with a grandchild in another country?

That is the case this suits best. One of them opens a board and reads out the five-character code; the other types it in. Nothing is installed, no account is made, and neither has to be shown how — there are no rules to teach.