Snakes & Ladders

A hundred squares, nine ladders, ten snakes and one die. Roll, move, and if you land at the foot of a ladder you go up it, or at the head of a snake you go down. First to a hundred wins. That is genuinely all of it.

There are no decisions in this game whatsoever, and that is not a shortcoming. It is the point. Nobody can play it badly, nobody can be outplayed by somebody older, and a five-year-old has exactly the same chance as everybody else at the table. Very few games can say that.

This is the standard board rather than a randomly generated one. The ladder from eighty runs all the way to a hundred, and the snake at ninety-eight drops you twenty squares from the finish, which is the thing everybody remembers about the game. You need the exact number to land on a hundred, so a roll that would take you past it leaves you where you are.