So, I’m a big old fool who broke his toe earlier and has subsequently spent the entire evening in the waiting room at the hospital, along with his poor long-suffering wife and child.<\/p>\n
But I was witness to the best game of Snakes and Ladders ever, which I absolutely must tell you all about.<\/p>\n
Two young boys, I presume brothers, approached the king-size S&L board painted on the floor in the waiting room. Well, technically the older one dragged the younger one by his sleeve, but that’s just a detail really.<\/p>\n
The older brother announced “Right, I’m 11, so I move 11 squares. 1, 2, 3…” and so forth until he was stood on square 11. He then moved up the ladder to 14. “…and you’re 4, so you move to 4.”<\/p>\n
He reached across to his brother, grabbed his sleeve, and manhandled him onto square number 4.<\/p>\n
The game continued, each turn the older brother advancing by 11 and the younger brother by 4. I wasn’t paying heaps of attention, but I was aware of the older brother when he hit the final square and still had a few steps left to take, so he backed up a few squares.<\/p>\n
Then it struck me – to get an exact landing on the final square from 11 paces, the older brother would have to be moving from square 11. And that square had a ladder on it that led to 14. It was absolutely impossible for the older brother to win.<\/p>\n
My wry smile turned to a grin when I realised that his younger brother was currently 4 squares back from a ladder which led to square 18. In two moves, the younger brother would land exactly on the final square.<\/p>\n
And so it came to pass. The younger brother couldn’t believe that he had won. The older brother couldn’t believe that he hadn’t. After all, the whole game was stacked so that he’d win, right? 11 against 4? How could it end up like this.<\/p>\n
The Snakes are a fickle mistress, yes, but do not assume that the Ladders can do you no harm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So, I’m a big old fool who broke his toe earlier and has subsequently spent the entire evening in the waiting room at the hospital, along with his poor long-suffering wife and child. But I was witness to the best game of Snakes and Ladders ever, which I absolutely must tell you all about. Two […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-iamowim","category-meander"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pete.nu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pete.nu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pete.nu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pete.nu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pete.nu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pete.nu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pete.nu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pete.nu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pete.nu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}