A runner-board game for kids and teens. Roll the dice, race across a hundred squares of crumbling ruins, and cut down every snake that gets in your way. Snake & Ladders meets Prince of Persia, with RPG combat on every encounter.
Snake & Ladders gives the structure - a hundred squares, dice, ladders up, snakes down. Prince of Persia gives the feel - running, leaping, a hero against the ruins. RPG combat gives the stakes - every snake is a fight, not a slide.
A 10x10 grid of numbered squares. Roll a die, move forward. Land on a ladder, climb. Land on a snake, you don't slide - you fight.
Between squares, the camera swings sideways. Your hero auto-runs through a short platforming beat - jump pits, vault ledges, dodge blades. It's the connective tissue.
Snakes are not penalties - they're opponents. Turn-based, Final Fantasy-style. Attack, defend, use skills, manage AP. Beat the snake, claim its square. Lose, and slide back down.
The whole game is one tight loop, repeated a hundred times. Every iteration takes 30-90 seconds. That's the pace that keeps a kid on the bus hooked, and a teen coming back after school.
Snake & Ladders is beloved because anyone can play it - roll, move, hope. But it has a known flaw: you make no decisions. The dice decide everything. That's fine for a five-year-old and boring for a thirteen-year-old.
This game fixes that without losing the simplicity. The dice still move you, but every snake is a combat encounter you can win or lose on skill. The runner beats between squares add motion and timing. Ladders stay pure luck - the reward for landing on a good square.
So chance opens the door, skill walks through it. That's the whole pitch in one line.
Design principle: the loop must close in under 90 seconds. If a single snake fight drags past two minutes, the board game rhythm dies.
Every feature, every art choice, every line of code gets measured against these three. If it doesn't serve one of them, it doesn't ship.
The player's brief was one word: fun. So fun is the first pillar, not the last paragraph of a design doc. If a mechanic isn't fun in a 30-second playtest, it gets cut or reworked.
Prince of Persia's signature is momentum - the hero never stops. Our board is turn-based, but the camera and the runner beats keep the screen alive between every roll. Stillness is the enemy.
Kids need to understand the screen in one glance. Teens need it to look like something they'd screenshot. So the art is bold, flat, high-contrast - a desert poster, not a muddy realism attempt.
A working prototype of the 100-square board. Roll the die, watch your hero advance, hit a ladder to climb, hit a snake to trigger combat. The full game wraps runner beats around each move - here you get the board logic and a taste of the fight.
Turn-based, Final Fantasy-flavored. You have AP - action points - that refill each turn. Spend them to attack, defend, or unleash a skill. Beat the snake's HP to zero and you hold the square. Hit zero yourself and you slide back. Try it below.
A standalone fight against a Sand Viper. In the full game, this triggers when you land on a snake square.
The game ships with four worlds, each a complete 100-square board with its own palette, snake types, and boss. Together they tell a simple story: a hero climbing down into the ruins to face the Serpent King.
Desert ruins at golden hour. Tutorial board. Ladders are wooden, snakes are small vipers. Boss: the Dust Serpent.
Difficulty: 1/5Underground palace, torchlit. Ladders are gilded, snakes are cobras with spit attacks. Boss: the Jade Cobra.
Difficulty: 3/5Flooded tower, bioluminescent. Ladders are coral, snakes are sea serpents with constricting wraps. Boss: the Tide Coil.
Difficulty: 4/5Volcanic heart of the ruins. Ladders are bone, snakes are magma wyrms. Final boss: the Serpent King himself.
Difficulty: 5/5A small, readable cast. One hero the player controls, one villain they're chasing, and a handful of snake types that double as combat opponents and board hazards.
A thief-turned-explorer who rolled the wrong die and woke the Serpent King. Quick tongue, quicker feet. The player's avatar across all four boards.
Ancient ruler of the ruins, woken when Zara stole the golden die. He's the final square, the final boss, and the reason every snake on the board wants you gone.
An old ruin-keeper who trades elixirs and hints between boards. Sells skills, upgrades, and the occasional loaded die - for a price.
Each world introduces new snake types with different combat behaviors. The board tells you which snake is on a square by its color and icon. The fight tells you why that matters.
Flat colors, bold silhouettes, high contrast. The game reads at a glance on a phone screen in sunlight. Three primary colors do the structural work; ink lines hold the shapes; paper tones carry the warmth.
The whole game runs on six colors. No gradients, no texture maps, no muddy mid-tones. Every surface is a flat plane from this set.
Blue is the hero, the player, the safe ground. Red is danger, snakes, bosses. Yellow is reward, ladders, gold, the goal.
Every character and monster is designed to read as a single flat shape at 32x32 pixels. If the silhouette isn't recognizable at icon size, the design goes back to the sketchbook.
Hero / Snake / Ladder at icon scale
A board game that plays like a video game, sized for a phone. The audience is kids 8-13 and teens 14-17 who grew up on Snake & Ladders and want something with more teeth. Parents buy it; kids play it; teens share it.
Snake & Ladders is the second most-played board game on Earth after chess. Everyone already knows the rules. The combat layer is the only new thing to learn - and it's the fun part.
Sessions run 2-15 minutes. One-thumb controls. No board to set up, no pieces to lose. It's the game a kid plays on the ride to school, not the game that needs the dining table cleared.
Bold flat shapes and a three-color palette screenshot well. Teens share what looks good. The desert-poster look is built to travel on social feeds without a marketing budget.
Four boards ship at launch. The board-plus-snake-types system is modular - new acts are new palettes, new snake behaviors, new bosses. DLC is a design feature, not an afterthought.
Six phases. The board and combat demos on this page are phase 02 - playable proof that the core loop works before a single asset gets finalized.
Concept locked, pillars defined, loop diagrammed. This document.
Board logic and combat system working in-browser. You're looking at it. Next: wire the two together so landing on a snake launches the fight.
One full board - Act I, Sunken Gate - with final art, runner beats, sound, and the Dust Serpent boss fight. The thing we show to publishers.
Build out Acts II-IV. Four boards, sixteen snake types, four bosses, the Keeper's shop, and the skill tree.
200 kids and teens. Watch them play. Cut what they skip. Keep what they replay.
iOS and Android, premium, $4.99. Four boards, no ads, no timers. Then we listen.
Three games, one board game, and a design principle. The DNA is visible - this isn't originality for its own sake, it's recombination with intent.