How Snakes and Ladders Lost its Soul
Before it became a “British” children’s game, it was a spiritual lesson from India.
In Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), Saleem Sinai sits down to play his favorite game. It’s not chess, the cerebral Indian game of strategy that his father would prefer he learn; no, it’s snakes and ladders.
Snakes and ladders is a game with three ingredients: a 10x10 board, pawns, and a die. The number you roll determines how many squares you move. Your goal is to advance from square one to square 100 before your opponent. The catch? Some squares have ladders that allow you to move up, closer to the finish line, while others send you through a snake’s mouth downwards, to earlier squares. Saleem loves the game for capturing “the eternal truth that for every ladder you climb, a snake is waiting just around the corner; and for every snake, a ladder will compensate.”
Lest you think snakes and ladders was always a simple game of chance, its origins were anything but. But once British toymakers got their hands on the game, they rewrote its entire meaning.