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MEMORIES:
Tasha remembers...I played this game a lot with family members at Christmas time. I was very good at it. I was ... More »
Posted on 04/22/08
Manufacturer:
If it’s one thing that must occupy the time of parents more than other it’s the teaching of values to their youngsters. How to do it? How to impart with visual alacrity the nature of right and wrong?
Well, whether or not today’s parents know it, but parents thousands of years ago, dating back to the second century B.C. in India devised their own way. Of course, they were teaching Hindu values, but with the ladder and the snake both being rather universal, the method is highly adaptable. In this case, ladders stood on bases that represented different kinds of good while snakes struck unsuspectingly from squares indicative of various forms of evil.
The game made its way to Victorian England where it caught on like wildfire. Some game historians claim that John Jacques (pronounced “Jakes”) of the age-old toy company Jacques of London westernized an ancient Indian game known as Dasapada, a variation on what we know as Chess. Whatever the origin, Jacques of London released Snakes and Ladders and saw it become a late nineteenth century phenomenon with such popular virtues as penitence, thrift, and industry being the basis for sound ladder scaling.
While derived from Snakes and Ladders, the U.S. equivalent was copyrighted in 1870 and made more children friendly by giving it a playground theme. Unlike the British game, which uses dice, the American equivalent Chutes and Ladders features a spinner that determines how many spaces a player may move per turn. Every time a player lands on a square, he or she becomes the perpetrator of a good or a bad deed. A noble deed like rescuing a kitty stranded up in a tree would allow you to climb a ladder to the next tier of squares. Eating too much candy of abusing bicycle safety guidelines resulted in slipping down a slide to the tier below. While the first player to the end won, everyone had to worry about the nearby chute that would plummet one down sixty-three spaces.
As teaching morals is generally based upon a certain ethic that frowns upon guile, Chutes and Ladders eliminated any need for strategy. There was no manipulating opponents, no outsmarting the game, no looking several steps ahead. If anything, Chutes and Ladders imparted something of a fatalistic point of view in that one simply spun the spinner and accepted the consequences of a good or bad choice without actually making the choice. Because of this, older gamers are often found huddled around different games, but there’s no question that those with little ones can find plenty to appreciate about Chutes and Ladders.
Milton Bradley recently sold the rights to Hasbro who manufacturers the game to this day. As long as two-to-four players don’t mind a simple game that engages the morals more than the mind, nothing beats a go at Chutes and Ladders.
