Printable Snakes and Ladders
What most people mean by a snakes and ladders printable is a grid they can put on the table and play across with a real die, and that is what the Print board button under this board produces. There is no separate file to fetch and no image to save: the sheet that comes out of the printer is this same board with the parts that only make sense on a screen taken off it. That matters more than it sounds, because a printable sheet kept as a second copy is a sheet that eventually stops matching the board it came from, and this one cannot drift, since there is only ever one of it.
What the button does
Print board opens your browser’s own print dialogue for this page. Nothing is downloaded and nothing is generated to be downloaded, which also means the same dialogue is where you would use a Save as PDF option if you wanted a file rather than a sheet of paper. The board is capped at seventeen centimetres across and marked so that it is not allowed to break across a page boundary, so it comes out on one sheet at a size a coin will sit on comfortably.
What comes off, and what stays on
Four things are removed on paper: the sentence describing the last move, the list of players and their squares, the three buttons, and the tokens themselves, none of which mean anything once a real die is involved. Everything a player has to read stays. All one hundred numbers print. The twenty-one squares that start a jump keep the arrow and the destination printed inside them, so a ladder foot still reads 21 ▲42 and a snake head still reads 74 ▼53, and you never have to trace a line to find out where something goes. The line naming the finishing rule stays too, which matters far more on paper than on a screen, because there is nothing left to announce what just happened to you.
Two things change rather than disappearing. The faint green and red tints behind the marked squares are dropped, because on a monochrome printer a tint becomes grey and a fifth of the board arrives flooded with it. And the lines joining each jump to its destination print thin and grey instead of coloured and solid, because a dark line crossing behind a dark digit swallows it whole – which would land hardest on precisely the twenty-one squares a player most needs to read.
Playing the printed sheet
You need one six-sided die and something for each player; coins of different sizes are the traditional emergency answer. Agree the ending before the first roll rather than at the point somebody overshoots, because both versions are standard: land on 100 exactly with anything over counted back down, or take any roll that reaches it. The printed sheet names the one this board was set to, at the bottom. Expect the pair of you to roll around sixty-one times between you under the exact-landing rule and around forty-three under the looser one, which is the difference between a long game and a short one on identical paper.
One thing worth trying to spot on the sheet, because it is easier to see on paper than on a screen: the shortest game this layout allows is six rolls. A 1, then a 6 onto the ladder at 7, a 1 onto the ladder at 15, a 2 onto the big ladder at 28, a 3 onto the ladder at 87, and a 6 to finish – four ladders climbed in six turns, ending exactly on 100 so it works under either ending. Nobody will ever roll it, but it is a good way to get a child to read the numbers on the board rather than only counting squares.
If you were hoping for a file
There is not one, and there does not need to be. Nothing on this page is embedded, hosted elsewhere or fetched while you use it, which is exactly why it can be printed without asking anybody. The board on screen also keeps working with the connection turned off once the page has loaded, so the paper version and the screen version are equally available on a train.