Snakes and Ladders sucks and is not a game.
This is the starting point I began my board game design from. I was playing games with my son (at the time he was 4 or 5) and even he was like “so, roll the dice…and move?” Like me, he quickly became disenfranchised with the idea of roll and move style games. So, the very first thing to do was to figure out how to add a degree of agency to the game. However, I didn’t (at the time) want to MAKE a game, I wanted to change a game, and so I wanted to keep the game mostly intact.
The way that we solved this first was to add a choice. If a player can’t make a choice, even a choice that leads to output randomness, they become easily disengaged. The excuse that we often use for games like this, or like Candyland, is that it’s for kids, and kids, as we know, don’t have brains or souls… so who cares?
So the way that we added choice was to offer an opportunity to choose HOW MANY dice you got to roll. Obviously, the best choice, in this case, is to roll two dice and move (statistically) further faster however the board itself creates a reason to make that choice. In Snakes and Ladders, landing on a particular space causes you to travel forward or backward further than you typically could with a roll. (There are a few chutes or snakes or ladders that just move a space or two forward or backward on the same tier, which makes for some pretty boring gameplay).
Here’s the scenario that we were trying to expand upon. You are on space 1 and there is a ladder on space 4 that goes from space 4 to space 25. You may choose to either roll both dice and move on average 7 spaces and land on space 8. OR, you can choose to roll 1 die and there is a 1 in 6 chance that you will roll a 3, land on space 4 and move to space 25. There is also a 2 in 6 chance that you will roll and 1 or a 2, move to space 2 or 3, and then have the opportunity next turn to roll a 1 or 2 and STILL end up on space 25 while the other player would average a 7 and would end up on space 15.
So obviously the correct move is to stay back, roll 1 die, and get to space 25. However, if you roll a 1 on your first turn, a 1 on your second turn, and a 2 on your third turn, you are now far behind the player who has rolled 3 7’s and is living the good life on space 22. OR, who rolled 3 12’s and is really enjoying the view from space 37. The goal is to create a choice that will give players a sense of control and agency of their play experience.
This was the initial iteration of SLHH. The “play testing” for this game would occur with my son.
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