F is for Follow-up . . . or Follow-down - Ladders AND Snakes!

Becoming a bit of a perennial here at Small Scale World, Loyal Readers, this will be the fourth Snakes & Ladder's Tag, as Christmas fast approaches, as we minimise the military content . . . and as I promise NO MORE SEX! For a bit, I've already had some sent in!

After both my old childhood Snakes and Ladders, and Theo van der Weerden's lovely Chad Valley one . . . 

. . . these turned up the other day! The same rich design and Edwardian litho-print colours of the previous two big-boards, and some age, but I don't know how much exactly! This one is marked The Harlesden Series, which Google says flourished between 1930-1950, so some age indeed, and applicable to both of them, as they were found together.

 

My favourite is 86-75, he's just sittin' there, Kool as der Kukumber Johnny! The characters are similar to Tiger Tim and the Bruin Boys, but not, so a knock-off playing with their iconography, or another set of known characters?

 

I used to work for a property-maintenance chap, lawns, drain-downs etc . . . and on one occasion we had to clean a pet'y carpet (dogs, an empty house will smell of the last dog for years after), so while he did that I went exploring and found an attic cubby-hole, which had a load of old games stuff, strewn about between the rafters, including these three, with two Snakes & Ladders boards, both with a Ludo board on the other side. This one is unmarked.

A quick second Google reveals that there is no order/hierarchy to the colours of the Ludo board, with all four possible combinations coming-up in the first few lines of results, along with substitutes like orange (for yellow) or pale-blue.

This was with them (along with stuff I won't bore you with, like home-Bingo cards with wooden numbers, old game-currency, card standees, that sort of thing, originally I had half-filled a bin-bag!), and it's an old Tiddlywinks 'target'. With no sign of corners, it must have either been designed to fold flat (which it does), or it went in the long-gone box tray, but if you looked after this to such a degree for all those decades, surely you would have looked-after the box too?

 

So, I suspect this is how it was, a portable playing 'arena'! More modern ones (the Merit one, we had as kids) would be in the box tray, with a plastic cup in the hole to collect the winks! Studying it, you realise scoring is pretty random, and it's more a game of luck than skill, but maybe if you played it a lot (no telly' back then!), you could get good at aimed jumps?