Depending upon where your marker lands, you can jump a whole lot of squares by suddenly going up a ladder, or you can be bitten by a snake and slide down, along its slithering body, to a square way, way below.
Ladders are of all sizes, as are the snakes.
The objective is to get to the 100th square, the player reaching it first being the winner. You can suddenly find yourself, down from square 99 to square 2 or 8. Or something like that. But, to get back from the game to the query that I received about the game. The young scholar who wrote to me wanted to know if I knew any old snakes and ladders boards from India, since his information was that the game, as known in the west, came originally from an eastern source .