An old race game moved to a playground.

Chutes and Ladders is the American edition of a race game that is much older than its name. English Wikipedia, citing Andrew Topsfield’s 1985 study in the journal Artibus Asiae and other histories of board games, traces snakes and ladders to a family of Indian dice games played on boards known by names such as Moksha Patam and gyan chaupar. On those boards, Wikipedia says, the ladders stood for virtues and the snakes for vices, so a player’s climb up the grid was read as a moral journey. The same article says the game was brought to the United Kingdom in the 1890s.

A British example survives in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The museum’s catalogue describes a snakes and ladders board published in London in 1892 by the firm of F. H. Ayres, registered that year: a chromolithograph mounted on a round wooden board, with a spiral track of 100 numbered squares, five red ladders and five green snakes. English Wikipedia, citing Topsfield, dates the registration to October 1892, and says that in Victorian England the Indian virtues and vices on the squares were replaced with English ones.

The American version came from the Milton Bradley Company of Springfield, Massachusetts, which Milton Bradley had set up as a lithography business in 1860, according to English Wikipedia. Milton Bradley introduced Chutes and Ladders in the United States in 1943, the toy historian Todd Coopee wrote on Toy Tales in 2019; Wikipedia lists it among the games the company added during the Second World War, together with Candy Land. In 1993 The New York Times marked the game’s fiftieth birthday, and reported that the Milton Bradley game had drawn on two sources: the traditional Snakes and Ladders and the company’s own Checkered Game of Life of 1860.

The change of name carried the main design decision. “A playground setting replaced the snakes that were thought to put kids off,” a Milton Bradley spokesman, Eric Blinderman, told the Times. The chutes do the same job in play — a piece that lands at the top of one slides back down the board — but the picture is now of slides and climbing frames rather than serpents.

Milton Bradley, Hasbro and a board that kept changing.

As Toy Tales describes it, the board is a grid of 10 by 10 squares numbered from 1 to 100, and players move by spinner rather than by dice; whoever reaches square 100 at the top wins. Coopee wrote that Milton Bradley kept the basic premise of the older game while giving it a theme of playground equipment, and took a lighter moral tone. The pictures still carry the lesson: at the foot of a ladder a child does something helpful, such as mowing the lawn, and at the top enjoys the reward; at the top of a chute a child misbehaves, for example by eating too many cookies, and at the bottom faces the result.

The Times report of 1993 gives a short record of how the box and board changed with the audience. It said the game teaches the consequences of good and naughty deeds, that more children appeared on the 1993 cover than in the early 1970s, and that Black children had appeared on the board since 1974.

Ownership changed in the 1980s. On 5 May 1984 The New York Times reported that Hasbro, the toy maker based in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, had agreed to acquire the Milton Bradley Company, with the deal expected to close that August. English Wikipedia says Milton Bradley was merged with Hasbro’s other games company, Parker Brothers, to form Hasbro Games in 1998, and that the Milton Bradley name continued as a brand until 2009, when it gave way to the parent company’s own name, now Hasbro Gaming. Hasbro has owned Chutes and Ladders, with the rest of the Milton Bradley line, since 1984.

Under Hasbro the game has been reissued in new formats. The Internet Archive holds a 1999 Hasbro Interactive CD-ROM of Chutes and Ladders for the PC, and English Wikipedia records editions illustrated with characters from children’s television, among them Sesame Street and Dora the Explorer. The name itself stayed largely American: Wikipedia says that in Canada the game has traditionally been sold as Snakes and Ladders by the Canada Games Company, including a Canadian version with toboggan runs in place of snakes.

Design and documentation.

A board game brand is carried less by any single object than by a set of printed parts that travel together: a box lid, a board, a handful of tokens or dice, and a folded sheet of rules. The lid does most of the public work, because it sits on a shelf and has to name the game, show what kind of play is inside and carry the maker’s mark, often at a size that reads from across a shop.

Inside, the board turns the game’s logic into a layout of spaces, tracks and colour-coded zones, and the tokens, cards and score pads repeat that colour code in miniature. Rule sheets are the quiet part of the identity, with their own headings, diagrams and house style, and they are often revised when a game is reissued.

Game names also change hands more often than their players notice, so the company printed on a lid may not be the one that first published it. Each guide separates what dated, independent sources record about a game’s origins, owners and editions from what the companies say about themselves.

A name that is also the rulebook.

The Chutes and Ladders identity is built into its title. The two nouns name the two things that move a piece other than the spinner, so the name, the board and the rules say the same thing. Milton Bradley’s change from snakes to chutes, which the company explained in 1993 as a way of keeping young players from being put off, turned a creature into a piece of playground equipment and gave the whole board a single setting.

That setting carries much of the visual identity. Where the 1892 Ayres board in the Victoria and Albert Museum is a spiral of numbers crossed by plain red ladders and green snakes, the Milton Bradley board, as Toy Tales describes it, is a grid of illustrated squares in which children do helpful or naughty things and then climb or slide. The good-and-bad pairs are drawn as small scenes rather than written as virtues and vices, so the moral lesson of the older Indian and Victorian boards is still there, but told in pictures.

The box has changed with its players. The New York Times recorded in 1993 that the cover had added children since the early 1970s, and that Black children had been part of the board since 1974. Licensed editions with television characters, recorded by English Wikipedia, show the format being used as a frame for other brands while keeping the same climb.

For a design guide, Chutes and Ladders shows how renaming a single element — a snake that became a slide — can give an old game a new setting, a new tone and a title that explains itself. Compare it with Candy Land, another Milton Bradley board added during the Second World War, and Operation, the Milton Bradley skill game of 1965. For this guide we use slide blue, ladder red and grass green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Chutes and Ladders’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.