Snakes and Adders (Jam Edition)

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 game was written in Python with Pygame in 48 hours (technically longer - more on that below) for the University of Liverpool Game Developers Society's first game jam, in Summer 2020.

Post-Jam Changelog:

Amusingly, I had to make most of these post-jam changes in my last jam, too. In particular, the fourth bullet point is due to a mistake in the Pygame template I use, which I probably ought to fix...

• Froze the game into an executable file.
• The game font is now included in and loaded from the assets folder, to make the executable work.
• The game font is also different now, because I couldn't find the font I was using previously in my Windows fonts folder.
• Fixed a bug that would cause a pop-up error message to open every time the executable version of the game was closed.
• Made several changes to this page over time.