Cash-Out Ladder Games: Road Hop, Tower and More

A ladder game is a series of steps. At each step there is a chance to hit a trap; if you survive, the multiplier goes up, and you can cash out at any time (you lock in the current multiplier). Tower and Road Hop are the clearest examples: both are plain survival ladders with a fixed chance per step. The rule that prices every step is the same in all of them: the multiplier is 0.97 divided by the chance of surviving every step so far, so no stopping point is better than another. This guide shows the tables for both games and explains what the other ladder-style games in the app add.

The ladder idea

Every ladder game has the same three parts:

1. A survival chance for each step. Sometimes it is the same every step (Road Hop), sometimes it comes from the board layout (Mines, Tower).
2. A multiplier that rises with each step. It is 0.97 divided by the chance of surviving that far.
3. A choice at every step: continue or cash out. Cashing out keeps the multiplier you hold. Hitting a trap loses the bet.

Because of that pricing, the expected return at every stopping point is 0.97 x (chance of reaching it) / (chance of reaching it) = 0.97. Two things follow. Cashing out early or late makes no difference to the average, and stopping rules ("always stop after 5 steps", "stop when I am up 3x") cannot add up to more than 97%. The cash-out games guide shows the same idea with Mines tiles, in how cash-out games work.

What you control is the shape of your results: stopping early gives frequent small wins, stopping late gives rare large ones. The volatility guide explains why those can look so different with the same return.

Tower: choose a door, climb nine floors

Tower has 9 floors. On each floor you pick a door; some doors are traps. The mode sets how many doors there are and how many are traps:

The traps for all nine floors are drawn when the round starts, on the server. Which door you pick does not matter: on any floor, every door has the same chance of being safe. The chance of reaching floor k is the per-floor chance multiplied k times, and the multiplier is 0.97 divided by it:

The chance of clearing all nine floors is 7.5% on Easy, 2.6% on Medium, 0.2% on Hard (1 in 512) and 0.005% on Expert (1 in 19,683). In every row, chance times multiplier is 0.97.

Hard mode shows the structure most clearly: each floor is a coin flip that doubles the multiplier, minus the 3% (1.94x for one floor, 3.88x for two, 7.76x for three). Expert mode triples it each time at one chance in three.

Road Hop: cross the lanes

Road Hop has no choices. Each lane is a fixed chance of a hit, the traps are drawn at the start, and you tap to hop to the next lane or cash out. The mode sets the number of lanes and the hit chance per lane:

The multiplier after some lanes:

Two points worth noting. First, Road Hop's multipliers are modest because each lane is only a small risk: the top of the ladder is 2.58x on Easy and about 5.5x on Hard, far below Tower's top steps. Second, the lane-by-lane risk is constant, so the chance of getting through n lanes shrinks gradually. On Easy, the odds of getting through 10 lanes are 66.5%, through 20 are 44.2%, and through all 24 are 37.5%.

Tower style and Road Hop style compared

Both return 97% at every step.

If you never cash out: how far do you get?

A useful way to feel the difference between modes is to ask how many steps you would clear on average if you simply kept going until you hit a trap or reached the top. For a game with a fixed chance q of passing each step, that average is q + q^2 + ... up to the last step:

Tower's harder modes are designed so that you usually clear no more than a floor or two, which is exactly why the top multipliers are so large. Road Hop is the opposite: it is built for long walks, and a typical run gets about halfway. Neither average says anything about the best time to cash out (there is none), but it shows what each mode is asking of you.

Where the pattern appears in the app

Many games use a ladder of survive-or-lose steps with cash-out at any point. They share the rule that the multiplier is priced from the chance of surviving, but most now have their own shape, so do not assume the Tower or Road Hop tables apply:

• Mines covers a tile board where the survival chance falls as you go (see how Mines works).
• Claw Machine, Safe Crack, Frozen Lake, Laser Heist, Potion Brew and Ladder Dash are cash-out games built on the same pricing rule, each with its own course, step chances and extras.
• Duck Shoot, Knockdown, Mine Cart and Light Stack began as Tower in other costumes and now have their own rules and prize lines.

The numbers for each are on the game's page and its info screen (i). The common thread is the pricing rule. Some games add features, for example a shield that absorbs one mistake or a bonus card at the top, and in these the multiplier is set from the expected final payout rather than a flat per-step chance, but the result is the same: every way of stopping returns the same average.

What stays the same everywhere

• The return: 97% at every step and in every mode.
• The traps are drawn first. The server decides them at the start; the order you act in does not change them.
• The cap: no round pays more than 50,000 times the bet or 250,000,000 coins. Ladders end the round with an automatic cash-out before a step that would pass it.
• No hot streaks. A run of safe steps does not make the next one riskier or safer. See the streaks guide.

If you notice yourself raising your target after each safe step, that is the usual way ladders go wrong. Decide your stopping step before the round starts.