Beating Your Granny at Snakes and Ladders

Overview

Goals

Your task is to design a game of snakes and ladders that is ‘rigged’ in such a way that you, as a knowledgeable player, can (almost) always beat an opponent. It requires you to think about the DESIGN of the board as well as the DESIGN of the dice.

Learning Objectives

This task will encourage you to think about how probability works in games of chance and also how numbers behave when combined. You will learn to think in a systematic way and also will learn to document a test strategy in order to show how well your solution works.

Context

Snakes and Ladders is an ancient board game that is traditionally played with a cardboard board and a pair of dice. When a player's playing piece lands at the bottom of a ladder - the playing piece advances to the top of the ladder. When a playing piece lands on the tail of a snake, the playing piece has to go back to the place where the snake's head is . The winner of the game is the first to get to the top (i.e. the last square) of the board. Players take turns to throw one or more dice.