Snakes and Ladders has no skill in it whatsoever, and that is exactly why it survives. Nobody can be blamed for losing and nobody can take credit for winning, which makes it the rare board game that works with a five-year-old and a grandparent in the same room.

Snakes and Ladders Jim is the version you already know: a hundred squares, ladders that fling you up the board, snakes that drop you back down, and a dice roll deciding all of it.

How to play

• Roll the dice and move that many squares along the board.
• Land at the foot of a ladder and you climb to the top of it.
• Land on a snake's head and you slide down to its tail.
• Reach square 100 first to win the game.

What we changed and what we left alone

We left the board alone. The snake and ladder positions are the traditional ones, so a game plays out at the pace people remember rather than a made-up layout that dumps you at square 3 every other turn.

What we did add is the part the cardboard version cannot do: matches against players elsewhere in the world, private rooms so you can play with people you actually know, and a computer opponent for when nobody else is around.

Good to know

• Two to four players, online or on a single shared device.
• Plays fully offline against the computer.
• A round takes five to ten minutes.
• No reading required, so younger players can follow it on their own.

It is a game of pure luck dressed up as a race, and it has been reliably entertaining for well over a century. We saw no reason to complicate it.