The History of Snakes and Ladders
Snakes and Ladders comes from a family of Indian dice board games and reached England in the 1890s.
From India
Snakes and Ladders comes from a family of Indian dice board games; in ancient India it was known as Moksha Patam, and a Jain version is called Gyan chaupar. The ladders stood for virtues such as generosity, faith and humility, the snakes for vices such as anger and theft: good deeds lead to liberation, bad ones back down.
To England
The game was brought to the United Kingdom in the 1890s. The earliest known English version, by F. H. Ayres, was registered in October 1892. Later it was also sold in the United States, from 1943 under a different name.
Snakes and Ladders at PaperGames
PaperGames uses two boards of its own, with its own arrangement of ladders and snakes, and a small board with 50 fields for little children. Tokens differ by shape rather than colour, so the game works on black-and-white e-ink, and the moves are named in the status line instead of being animated.