and ladders." The game is a central metaphor of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. The narrator describes the game as follows: All games have morals; and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures, as no other activity can hope to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder you hope to climb, a snake is waiting just around the corner, and for every snake a ladder will compensate. But it's more than that; no mere carrot-and-stick affair; because implicit in the game is unchanging twoness of things, the duality of up against down, good against evil; the solid rationality of ladders balances the occult sinuosities of the serpent; in the opposition of staircase and cobra we can see, metaphorically, all conceivable oppositions, Alpha against Omega, father against mother. Snakes & Lattes is a board game café chain headquartered in Toronto, Canada, named after snakes and ladders. In the Abby Hatcher episode "Game Time with Mo and Bo", Mo and Bo play a snakes and ladders video game on a computer tablet in a hotel. While playing they walk around, unknowingly causing trouble in the hotel. Through Abby's instructions, they use their bodies to simulate snakes and ladders to help those they affected. Snakes and Ladders is a 1980 album by Scottish singer-songwriter Gerry Rafferty. A 2001 Egyptian film, Elsellem wel te'ban, called after the game, about relationship mishaps of a flirtatious divorced young man falling in love. In SpongeBob SquarePants, the episode "Sailor Mouth" features a board game called Eels and Escalators, clearly based on Snakes and Ladders. A real-life version was released on November 2021. References Bibliography Further reading Shimkhada, Deepak (1983), "A Preliminary Study of the Game of Karma in India, Nepal, and Tibet" in Artibus Asiae 44:4, pp. 308–322. Topsfield, Andrew (1985), "The Indian Game of Snakes and Ladders" in Artibus Asiae 46:3, pp. 203–226. Topsfield, Andrew (2006), "Snakes and Ladders in India: Some Further Discoveries" in Artibus Asiae 66:1, pp. 143–179. External links Children's board games Traditional board games Tabletop games Roll-and-move board games Race games Indian inventions Markov models Milton Bradley Company games Products introduced in 1943