Moksha Patam · मोक्ष पटम

The old Indian game of snakes and ladders, played as one life, in English and Hindi, in a single HTML file. Every square tells part of a story from the Panchatantra or the Upanishads, in the order a life would meet them.

Play: https://codebpr.com/moksha-patam/ (add ?lang=hi to open in Hindi)

The board as a life

Squares	Stage	Stories from
1–20	Childhood	Panchatantra fables
21–40	Brahmacharya (student)	Taittiriya, Chandogya, Katha, Mundaka; Aruni from the Mahabharata
41–60	Grihastha (householder)	Brihadaranyaka, Isha, Taittiriya, Mahabharata
61–80	Vanaprastha (forest-dweller)	Brihadaranyaka, Kena, Chandogya
81–100	Sannyasa (renunciate)	Mundaka, Mandukya, the four Mahavakyas
101–110	Divine realms, with Moksha at 105 partway along them	Bhagavad Gita 9.21 on the fall past 110

How the snakes and ladders are placed

• Nothing on squares 1–5. A newborn can't climb by virtue or fall by vice.

• Childhood vices are small slips (chatter, fibbing, laziness) with short falls. Adult enemies like anger, craving and greed only appear in the householder years. Ahankara (ego) waits at 99 and is the longest fall of all.

• Ladders are biggest in the middle of life (truth, resolve, giving, duty) and short near the end. No ladder reaches heaven, so the divine row is reached on foot.

• Moksha is an exit, not a summit. It sits at 105, partway along the divine row, as Vaikuṇṭha sat a few steps before the end of the old boards. Landing exactly on it is liberation. Passing it carries you into the higher heavens (Lakshmi, Saraswati, Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva), which are still the wheel.

• Heaven runs out. Nothing above Moksha turns back. A player who passes 105 walks the heavens, 106 to 110, and the throw that would carry them past 110 is the fall: the merit is spent and the life ends there: kṣīṇe puṇye martya-lokaṃ viśanti, when merit is spent you return to the world of mortals (Gītā 9.21), and every world up to Brahma's returns (8.16). Most of the surviving rules texts send the overreacher back to the world in the same way. Shiva's card at 110 shows the fall after his own.

• No exact roll, and a way back down. A roll that would pass 110 walks up to it and back down by the remainder, so no roll is ever wasted. It is also how you reach the exit again once you have overshot it: from 110 a 5 comes back down onto Moksha, and so does a 6 from 109.

• Fall, then the remedy: five snakes drop you one square before the ladder of the virtue that heals them:

  • Pride of learning → Guru-bhakti
  • Greed → Dana
  • Anger → Daya
  • Hypocrisy → Tapas
  • Clinging → Vairagya

  The tail's card says the ladder is one step above.

• 14 snakes to 11 ladders, on purpose. The documented historical boards are balanced or ladder-heavy: the Jaina board 15 ladders to 9 snakes, the Vaiṣṇava board 10 to 10, the Mughal board 17 to 13 (docs/BOARDCRAFT.md). The popular claim that snakes outnumbered ladders two to one is folklore. This board is more punishing than any of them as a deliberate thesis, that the good path is the harder one, not as a restoration.

Ladder	Virtue	Story
6→15	Maitri · Friendship	Crow, mouse, tortoise and deer (Panchatantra)
12→24	Buddhi · Wit	The lion and the clever hare (Panchatantra)
23→37	Guru-bhakti	Aruni holds back the flood (Mahabharata)
28→45	Satya · Truth	Satyakama Jabala (Chandogya 4.4)
34→53	Shraddha · Resolve	Nachiketa at Death's door (Katha)
44→63	Dana · Giving	"Datta" from the thunder (Brihadaranyaka 5.2)
51→67	Daya · Compassion	"Dayadhvam" from the thunder (Brihadaranyaka 5.2)
57→75	Dharma · Duty	King Janaka
65→83	Vairagya · Detachment	Maitreyi's question (Brihadaranyaka 2.4)
72→89	Tapas · Austerity	Bhrigu and Varuna (Taittiriya 3)
85→94	Viveka · Discernment	Two birds on one tree (Mundaka 3.1.1)

Snake	Vice	Story
14→8	Vachalata · Chatter	The tortoise and the geese
19→11	Asatya · Fibbing	The blue jackal
29→17	Alasya · Laziness	Subhashita
39→22	Vidya-mada · Pride of learning	The lion-makers
47→31	Kama · Craving	Yayati
55→43	Lobha · Greed	The greedy jackal and the bowstring
59→50	Krodha · Anger	The brahmin and the mongoose
62→46	Moha · Attachment	Dhritarashtra
69→52	Matsarya · Envy	Duryodhana at Indraprastha
77→58	Mada · Pride	The gods and the Yaksha (Kena 3)
88→71	Dambha · Hypocrisy	The cat who played ascetic
93→64	Asakti · Clinging	Jada Bharata and the fawn (Bhagavata 5.8)
99→61	Ahankara · Ego	Virochana and the reflection (Chandogya 8.8)
past 110	Kshina-punya · Merit spent	The fall, which ends the life: when merit is spent, back down into the world (Gita 9.21)

A 20,000-game simulation (npm run sim) puts a single life at a median of 28 turns, with one game in twenty taking 49 or more and none over 100. About half of lives reach Moksha (47.6%); nearly all the rest pass it and fall from the heavens (49.2%), and a few run out of years (3.2%). The distribution has a long tail, so the sim reports the median and the 95th percentile rather than the mean.

Features

• Every square is a card you can read. Tap any square on the board, or any move in the log, to open its card. The log also names every square a move passed over, and each of those opens too. The cards are drawn as pothi folios, palm-leaf manuscript pages. ‹ › (or the arrow keys) turns the leaves from 1 to 110, so you can read the whole board without rolling once. Cards can be linked: #sq/36 opens square 36.
• Cards wait for you. Your landing card stays open until you close it, and the computer waits while you read. A computer's own landing card closes itself after a moment, unless you start reading it.
• The card opens with its story. Each card opens on its picture, set in a painted Basohli arch, with the moment and the mirror under it. The schools' voices and the notes wait behind one tap, and stay open while the card does.
• Roll from the card. The card has its own Roll, so you can keep reading and keep playing. It turns to each of your landings in place. On a snake or a ladder it stays on that square while your token falls or climbs. A computer's turn plays on the board and is only noted on the card.
• On a phone the card is a sheet at the bottom of the screen, with the whole board above it. Drag the grip, or tap it, to raise or lower the sheet. Swipe it down, tap the board, press × or press Escape to close it. Scrolling the text never closes it.
• Every square is a scene with someone in it, and an argument. Each lead line names a person, a school or a text, and at the default depth two schools disagree about it.
• Painted squares in the Basohli manner: flat colour, one black outline, figures in profile with one large eye. The old emoji come back for any square without a picture.
• Three reading depths decide what a card shows when you open it further: Story (nothing more), Story + school (what the darśanas would have argued on that square), and Scholar (IAST, notes on the sources, and the people involved). Square 36 carries Vedānta's three-way split over tat tvam asi, and Moksha, square 105, sets each school's own idea of mokṣa side by side.
• The Codex, beside the moves: schools, sources and people. It fills in as you meet them and is kept between games. Entries can be linked too: #codex/nyaya.
• English / हिंदी, for the whole page (remembered), or per card with its own toggle. There is also an option to show both languages on every card, for Hindi learners. Hindi mode uses Devanagari digits.
• Sound: a die rattle, a page turn, a rising scale for ladders and a hiss for snakes, all synthesised with Web Audio. It has a mute button that is remembered, and it is softer with reduced motion.

To play locally, open index.html. Add ?seed=N to replay the same dice (the current seed is shown under Players & rules). ?depth=scholar sets the reading depth. Add ?debug to get console helpers: mp.jump(n), mp.roll(v), mp.seed() / mp.seed(n), mp.open(n), mp.entry(id), mp.close(), mp.setLang("hi"), mp.age() (the lens the board is aged through), mp.audio(), mp.quality("low"), mp.sheet() (the card's state: its sheet height, whether it is opened further, whether it was rolled from) and mp.rollFromCard(v).

Developing

index.html is built, so don't edit it by hand. The sources are:

• src/: the game as ES modules (engine/ holds the rules, render/ the drawing, and rng.js the only randomness)
• content/*.json: the squares and stories (squares.json), the school lines and scholar notes for each square (readings.json), the Codex (codex.json), the UI strings (strings.json), and the names a lead line can carry (names.json, for the lint)
• assets/sprites.svg: one Basohli symbol per square and a seal per school, inlined by the build (delete it and the board shows emoji)
• src/sw.js, manifest.webmanifest, icons/: the installable app (node tools/icons.mjs redraws the icons)
• src/styles.css and src/index.html: the page shell

npm install
npm run build    # inline src/ and content/ into index.html (refuses any Math.random outside rng.js)
npm test         # rules, RNG and content tests (the build also refuses content missing Hindi or pointing nowhere)
npm run lint     # the content lint alone: Hindi, two voices per square, a name in every lead, the sprite palette
npm run smoke    # every phase's behaviour in a real browser, including offline, install, the emoji fallback and the drone
npm run perf     # frame times of a walk, a climb and a swallow on a throttled phone-sized page (reports, never fails)
npm run sim      # 20,000 headless lives; `node tools/sim.mjs 20000 2` for two-player races
npm run golden   # replays seeds through the pre-split game, the build and the sim, and checks the logs match

Commit the rebuilt index.html with your changes. GitHub Pages serves it straight from main. See REDESIGN.md for the phased plan.