Snakes and Adders

You find yourself in a high stakes game of Snakes and Ladders. Well, that's not so bad, right? At least they can't cheat... right? It's pure chance... right?

But these people play snakes and ladders differently.

The board starts with no snakes and no ladders. When a player rolls their die, they roll it into an opaque box, and nobody gets to see the result right away. First, they must place a ladder on the board, and their opponent must place a snake.

There are some rules for placement: neither end of a snake or ladder can touch either end of another snake or ladder, snakes and ladders cannot be placed completely horizontally, and snakes and ladders cannot exceed a certain length.

Once the snake and ladder have been placed, the players can view the roll, and the counter is moved the appropriate number of places, climbing a ladder or sliding down a snake as normal if it lands on one or the other.

The game continues like this until somebody reaches the 100th square - this player is declared the winner.

It's a bit strange, but it's simple enough. It's still totally random if you happen to roll a number corresponding to where your opponent placed a snake... right!?

You have a bad feeling. Your opponent will cheat, somehow. If you can discover how, maybe you can win. It's a risk, but you decide it's worth taking.

This is an updated version of a game originally written for the University of Liverpool Game Developers Society's first game jam, in Summer 2020. It is written in Python with Pygame. Check out the original version here.

v1.1 Changelog:

• Fixed an issue preventing the enemy from skipping placement of a ladder (or a snake, it was one or the other) if it can't find a pair of tiles to place one between. More work is still needed to make the enemy checks all possible pairs of tiles before choosing to skip.
• Implemented the win and loss conditions for the game, with the option to restart the game once it has ended.