Ladder Dash: how it plays, odds and payouts

Ladder Dash is a snakes-and-ladders board with money on the line. Your token starts at square 0, you roll a die six times, and where you end up sets the payout. Ladders lift you, snakes drop you, and landing exactly on square 30 ends the round with the top pay. Unlike most ladder games, a snake does not end the round: the danger is a lower payout, not a lost bet.

How a round works

1. Set your bet and tap Roll. The die moves your token along the board.
2. Ladders lift the token: 3 to 11, 8 to 16, 13 to 22 and 19 to 27. Snakes drop it: 14 to 4, 21 to 9, 26 to 15 and 29 to 18.
3. If a roll would take you past 30, you bounce back by the extra squares.
4. Between rolls you can tap Cash out to take the value shown, which is the average pay of the rolls you have left.
5. After six rolls the square you stand on sets your pay. Landing exactly on 30 finishes at once.

All six dice are drawn on our servers when the round starts. The die you see is the reveal.

Pay by final square

Squares below 12 pay nothing. A round pays something in 83.0% of cases, but only the top two bands (finish or 27 to 29) pay more than the bet. The return is 96.809%, a little under the 97% of most cash-out games.

Worked example

Roll a 3 on your first roll: the ladder lifts you from square 3 to square 11. The Cash out value after that roll reads 1.2564x, which is the average over everything the five remaining rolls could bring. A bet of 100 coins taken out there returns 125 coins. Roll a 4 instead and you land on plain square 4, where the value is only 0.913x.

Now fast-forward. After five rolls you are on square 27, with one roll left. The six faces send you to: 28 (pays 1.6x), 29 which has a snake down to 18 (0.42x), 30 (finish, 5.5x), 31 which bounces to 29 and then slides to 18 (0.42x), 32 which bounces to 28 (1.6x) and 33 which bounces to 27 (1.6x). The average is (1.6 + 0.42 + 5.5 + 0.42 + 1.6 + 1.6) / 6 = 1.8567x. That is what Cash out would show.

Max win and limits

The finish pays 5.5x, in 7.8% of rounds. That is far below the game-wide limits of 50,000x the bet and 250,000,000 coins per round. Volatility is low: even the best outcome is modest and a typical round returns somewhere between 0.16x and 1.6x.

What matters and what does not

• Cashing out early or late: every cash-out offer is the fair average at that moment, so the return does not change. Early gives you the average now; late gives you the actual outcome.
• Where the snakes are: they matter to the round, but you cannot avoid them. The dice are drawn before you start.
• Rolling speed: nothing. The dice are not affected by timing.

The game is about as relaxed as the lobby gets. If you want to see how a ladder where the next step really can end the round works, compare Frozen Lake. Background on both is in how ladder and tower games work.

How it differs from other cash-out games

In Tower and Mines a bad step ends everything. In Ladder Dash nothing ends the round early except the six-roll limit, which is why its return sits at 96.81% with a tiny top of 5.5x. Safe Crack is closer in length but harsher: miss a lock and the bet is gone.

Play with limits

Coins are virtual, have no cash value and cannot be withdrawn or exchanged for prizes. For adults (18+), for entertainment. Set a time limit before you play; see playing safely in Cashout Arcade.