Who actually invented Snakes and Ladders?

By Alexander Krasnobaev, who builds Leela Online · Published August 27, 2026

Where the 1892 date comes from

Search for the origin of Snakes and Ladders and you will meet one sentence again and again: a version was introduced in Victorian England in 1892, often credited to John Jaques of Jaques of London. Newspapers, blogs and quiz pages repeat it. The two halves of that sentence are not equal. The 1892 date is documented. The credit to Jaques is not: no board, register entry or document places a Jaques Snakes and Ladders in 1892. Here is where the sentence came from.

The English Wikipedia article carries the date to this day. In the revision live as I write, the sentence reads: “The underlying ideals of the game inspired a version introduced in Victorian England in 1892.” There is no footnote on it — the citation that sits nearby belongs to the previous sentence, about destiny and free will.

The date can be traced to the exact edit that introduced it. Revision 171487114, made on 14 November 2007 at 18:50 UTC with the edit summary “Changes made in History section”, added this line:

Impressed by the ideals behind the game, a newer version was introduced in Victorian England in 1892, possibly by John Jaques of Jaques of London.

That sentence is the origin of the Jaques claim, and it is unsourced. It is quoted here as the source of an error, not as evidence.

That edit added zero references. The word “possibly” was doing the work, and it was never resolved. The Jaques attribution was later removed from Wikipedia — the current article does not mention Jaques at all — but the 1892 stayed behind, detached from the claim it originally belonged to. Nineteen years of citation later, a hedge written by one editor is quoted as established fact.

To be exact about what is wrong here: the 1892 date is correct — a board of that year exists and is catalogued. The attribution to Jaques is what has no source. Anyone repeating it is repeating an unsourced 2007 Wikipedia edit, not a record.

What the museum record actually says

There is a real 1892 English Snakes and Ladders, and it is catalogued. The Victoria and Albert Museum holds it as MISC.8-1974. The museum’s own object history reads:

registered by F H Ayers of London, 1892, pat. no. 200682

The V&A’s brief description is equally plain: “Board game, snakes and ladders, F. H. Ayers, English, 1892.” The board itself is described as a circular spiral chromolithograph mounted on a round wooden board, 100 squares numbered 1 to 100, with five red ladders (6–40, 43–70, 60–95, 20–90, 23–54) and five green snakes (58–27, 76–21, 48–15, 97–10, 83–33). Someone wrote Phyllis Briggs, Harrogate in pencil underneath.

The registration is independently on record. The Games Research Database, kept by a group of game historians, holds the entry “Snakes and Ladders (Circular) — Design Registration”: 1892, F H Ayres, number 200682 — taken not from the museum but from the National Archives design register. Two independent records, the same number, the same maker. The register also corrects the museum’s wording: 200682 is a registered design, not a patent. (V&A spells the name Ayers, the register Ayres; the shared number settles that it is one maker.)

It also lists a surviving Ayres board — turned wood, spiral printed on paper, c1892, in a private collection — annotated “believed to be first English Snakes & Ladders”, with a note that the V&A holds another copy.

Two things follow. First, the five-and-five layout is nothing like the ten-and-ten of the Indian boards — the English version arrived already simplified. Second, and more awkwardly for the popular story: searching the V&A’s thirty-four catalogued Snakes and Ladders objects returns makers including Ayers, Chad Valley, Globe, J. & L. Randall and William Sallis. Jaques is not among them. A second 1892 board, B.892-1993, is catalogued without a maker at all.

No Jaques Snakes and Ladders of 1892 appears anywhere in the public record — not in the V&A catalogue, not in the National Archives design register, not in the collectors’ database. Every catalogued English board of that year is Ayres’s. Museums hold what they happen to hold, so this is not proof that no such board was ever made; it is the whole of the evidence that exists, and it points somewhere other than where the internet points.

The Indian original, and how old it really is

The ancestor is gyan chaupar — also written gyan chauper, and known regionally as moksha patam, paramapada sopanam and vaikuntapali. Every square carries a name: a state of mind, a virtue, a vice. Snakes return you to lessons not yet lived through; ladders lift you. It is the game before the meaning was stripped out of it.

The reference work is Jacob Schmidt-Madsen’s 2019 doctoral thesis at the University of Copenhagen, The Game of Knowledge — a critical study of a corpus of, in his words, “nearly 150 unique charts, more than 170 if variants are included.” It is 641 pages across two volumes and freely downloadable.

On age, his abstract is blunt: “gyān caupaṛ itself does not appear to have been invented before the late 17th or early 18th century.” The earliest chart that can be securely dated is a 72-square board made in Lucknow in 1780–82 for Richard Johnson of the East India Company, now in the British Library. So the claims you will meet — two thousand years old, five thousand years old, invented by a thirteenth-century saint — are not supported by the surviving objects. Not ancient in the way the marketing says. Old, real, and documented from the 1780s.

What is actually documented about the rules

Less than you would expect, and the reason is structural. Schmidt-Madsen, on page 200:

Instructions for playing gyān caupaṛ were rarely included on the charts themselves, and never on the 72-square Vaiṣṇava and 84-square Jaina charts under consideration here.

The rules travelled by word of mouth. Only two pre-20th-century rule texts survive, and they describe different boards — the Sanskrit Krīḍākauśalya of 1872, and a Gujarati manual of 1877/78 held at the L. D. Institute of Indology in Ahmedabad. Neither describes the 72-square board that the modern popular version uses. Here is what the record does establish:

• Board size follows the tradition. Vaishnava boards are 72 squares, with the winning square at 68 in the centre of the top row. Jaina boards are 84. Sufi boards are 100, Advaita Vedanta 108, and one Punjab Hills family runs to 342.
• Ten snakes is standard on the 72-square board. Schmidt-Madsen calls it “the standard number of ten snakes”, with roughly as many ladders. Jaina boards carry nine snakes and five or six ladders. The Nepali variant replaces ladders with six benign snakes.
• No dice, historically. Vaishnava boards were played with six or seven cowrie shells, the score being simply how many landed face up. Jaina boards used a single four-sided stick die inscribed 1-2-5-6 — one surviving chart states the configuration outright. Cubic dice are late.
• There was no standard endgame. Page 208: “Different sources propose different solutions to this problem, and it therefore seems likely that no standard solution was applied to the game as a whole.” The problem exists because the winning square sits in the middle of the top row, not at the end, so a piece can overshoot it.
• On the 72-square board, no exact final throw was needed. Landing on square 68 ends the game — “no additional throw is required after a pawn lands on sq. 68.”

The rules most people think are ancient

Modern Leela, including our own version, follows Harish Johari’s 1975 book. Two of its best-known rules turn out to be his.

The first is the six. Johari has pieces begin in Vaikuntha, square 68, and requires a roll of six before a player may enter the board at square 6. Schmidt-Madsen searched his whole corpus for it and wrote, on page 205:

The rule is not attested in any other sources, and is likely to be of Johari’s own invention.

Special entry throws do exist historically — but they are a “1” on the Jaina stick die, or a “10” with six cowries on Sufi boards. Never a six, and not on this board: “on the whole, 72-square Vaiṣṇava charts seem to have avoided rules involving special throws.”

The second is the overshoot rule — land exactly on 72 and take the snake down, or forfeit the turn. Schmidt-Madsen notes in a footnote that this one is not attested either, and was “probably adapted from the modern game of snakes and ladders.” In other words, the modern children’s game lent a rule back to its own ancestor.

One more small thing, since it trips people up constantly: the historical boards have ladders. “Arrows” is Johari’s word.

Why we are telling you this about our own game

We built an online version of Johari’s 72-square board, so this is not neutral ground. It would be easier to keep saying “a 2,000-year-old game” — the phrase converts. We stopped using it once we read the sources, and we corrected it everywhere it had already gone out, including our catalogue listings.

Our board follows Johari, six and all. That is a legitimate choice: his layout is a real Vaishnava chart, catalogued in the same corpus, and his design is the one that carried the game into the modern world. But a player deserves to know which parts are inherited and which parts one author added in 1975. If you land on square 6 in our game, you are following Harish Johari, not the eighteenth century — and that is worth saying out loud.

What is still unknown

Honestly, the interesting part. Nobody knows who made the first gyan chaupar board or when exactly. The traditional attribution to the poet-saint Jñāneśvar appears only in Maharashtrian sources, none earlier than the second half of the 19th century. Whether the English version of 1892 was preceded by an earlier import is unresolved. As for Jaques: no 1892 Jaques board and no 1892 Jaques document has been found. What has been found is a later one — GARD catalogues a dated Jaques board, c1900, John Johnson Collection, Bodleian Library, about eight years after the year the company gives. Jaques may well have published the game at some point; the year in their marketing is the part nothing supports. That is why I have asked publicly what is documented, rather than filling the gap with a guess.

Sources

• Jacob Schmidt-Madsen, The Game of Knowledge: Playing at Spiritual Liberation in 18th- and 19th-Century Western India, PhD thesis, University of Copenhagen, 2019. Open access, both volumes: vol. 1, vol. 2. Page numbers above refer to volume 1.
• Victoria and Albert Museum, MISC.8-1974, snakes and ladders, F. H. Ayers, 1892. Object history and physical description quoted from the museum record.
• English Wikipedia, Snakes and ladders, revision 171487114 of 14 November 2007, and the article as of 17 August 2026.
• Games Research Database (GARD), gamesboard.org.uk: design registration 200682, sourced from the National Archives design register; the Ayres board, c1892; the Jaques board, c1900, John Johnson Collection, Bodleian Library. Brought to my attention by James Masters of Traditional Games.
• Harish Johari, Leela: The Game of Self-Knowledge, 1975.

Quotations from the thesis and the museum are given verbatim; everything attributed above was checked against the source itself rather than against secondary write-ups. If you find an error here, tell me and I will correct it.