snakes and ladders

British

noun

(functioning as singular) a board game in which players move counters along a series of squares according to throws of a dice. A ladder provides a short cut to a square nearer the finish and a snake obliges a player to return to a square nearer the start

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

Example Sentences

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snakes and ladders

Salvadoran migrant, Guadalupe, likens the tactic to a giant game of snakes and ladders:

From BBC ● Jul. 31, 2024

“Things are going to be thrown at you on days like this, but it felt like one domino after another, like snakes and ladders, and I kept hitting the snakes today.”

From Reuters ● Jul. 29, 2019

It’s one big game of snakes and ladders, and eight of those teams will be rolling the dice this afternoon.

From The Guardian ● Feb. 3, 2018

The school was three stories tall, with hallways that looped on themselves and stairways connecting the floors like a giant game of snakes and ladders.

From The New Yorker ● Jan. 13, 2014

Laila got her to play snakes and ladders, and they ate shavings from blocks of dark chocolate, one of the few things they shared a common taste for.

From "A Thousand Splendid Suns" by Khaled Hosseini

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023