How to run an OSRS snakes and ladders clan event: board sizes, d6 roll rules, snake and ladder placement, task lists, and how to stop it dragging.
Snakes and ladders has quietly become the most requested clan event format after bingo, and it is easy to see why. It keeps the whole clan on one board, it produces a genuine narrative — the team that hit three snakes in a row and came back — and it does something bingo structurally cannot: it stops a runaway leader from ending the event on day two.
It is also the format most likely to drag. A badly tuned snakes and ladders board is a two-week slog where teams sit waiting on a roll, and clan leaders who have run one badly rarely run a second.
This guide covers the dice mechanics, board geometry, snake and ladder placement, and the rules you need to publish. If you want the broader picture of path-based events, the tile race guide covers the family this belongs to — snakes and ladders is a tile race with dice and setbacks bolted on.
Each team has one token on a numbered board. The loop is:
Land on a ladder and jump forward. Land on a snake and slide back. First team to the final tile wins.
The important detail, and the one clans get wrong constantly: you complete the tile you land on, not every tile you pass over. Rolling a 5 means one task, not five. This is what makes snakes and ladders faster per tile than a straight tile race and why the boards are longer.
Boards are usually laid out as a grid read boustrophedon — left to right, then right to left on the next row, like the physical board game. Three sizes cover almost every clan:
| Grid | Tiles | Clan size | Event length | Expected rolls to finish |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5x5 | 25 | 10–25 | 3–5 days | ~7 |
| 7x7 | 49 | 25–60 | 1–2 weeks | ~14 |
| 9x9 | 81 | 60+ | 2–3 weeks | ~23 |
That last column is the one to pay attention to, and it is the number nobody calculates in advance.
A d6 averages 3.5 spaces per roll. So a 49-tile board takes roughly 49 ÷ 3.5 = 14 rolls to cross, which means about 14 completed tasks per team.
Now multiply by your roll cadence:
A 9x9 board on a daily roll is a three-week commitment, and most clans lose interest around day ten. If you want a long board, use roll-on-completion. If you want a daily ritual, use a small board.
The single most common mistake in this format is a 9x9 board with a daily roll. It reads as generous and plays as a chore.
Daily roll. Every team rolls once per day at a fixed time. Creates a shared ritual, caps the pace so nobody can no-life ahead, and suits casual clans.
The problem is dead time. A team that finishes its task in an hour has nothing to do for 23 hours. Worse, a team that misses the roll window loses a full day through no fault of their own — and the window always lands badly for somebody's time zone.
If you use it: publish the exact roll time with a time zone, allow a captain to roll on behalf of an absent team, and consider auto-rolling for teams that miss the window rather than skipping them.
Roll on completion. A team rolls as soon as their current task is approved. No dead time, no time-zone unfairness, and the event ends when someone wins rather than when the calendar runs out.
The problem is that admin approval speed becomes the rate limiter. If approvals take six hours, teams spend the event waiting on you.
Recommendation: roll-on-completion for most clans, daily roll only if your clan is small, casual, and shares a time zone.
The placement rules are the same as any path event, but the dice make two of them sharper.
Ladders should outnumber and outweigh snakes. The point of the mechanic is to compress the field so last place stays interested. Symmetrical snakes and ladders just add noise.
Never place a snake in the final 15% of the board. A team three tiles from victory that slides back twenty is not experiencing drama, they are quitting.
Keep jumps to 3–6 tiles. A ladder that skips fifteen tiles skips fifteen tasks — content your clan does not get to play. And on a dice board, a big ladder can hand the event to whoever rolls well once.
Do not stack a snake immediately after a ladder. Landing on tile 19's ladder to tile 25, only to find 25 is a snake back to 20, feels like a bug rather than a rule.
A tested 7x7 (49-tile) layout:
| Type | From | To | Net |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ladder | 6 | 11 | +5 |
| Snake | 13 | 9 | −4 |
| Ladder | 17 | 22 | +5 |
| Snake | 24 | 20 | −4 |
| Ladder | 28 | 33 | +5 |
| Snake | 31 | 27 | −4 |
| Ladder | 36 | 41 | +5 |
| Snake | 39 | 35 | −4 |
| Ladder | 43 | 46 | +3 |
Five ladders, four snakes, nothing after tile 43, no jump over five, and no snake directly on a ladder's landing tile.
Because teams land on roughly one tile in 3.5, most of your tasks will never be completed by anyone. That changes how you write them.
Do not escalate difficulty smoothly. In a tile race every team does every tile, so a difficulty curve makes sense. Here, a team can leapfrog your carefully placed wall at tile 30 entirely. Instead, keep difficulty roughly uniform within each third of the board, so it does not matter much where a token lands.
Cap the RNG harder than in bingo. A drop-RNG tile in snakes and ladders is a hard block on a single team while others keep rolling. Always give an alternative: "obtain a Zulrah unique or 100 Zulrah kills".
Budget tasks by time, not by difficulty tier. The useful question is "how long does this take", because it directly sets your event length. For a one-to-two-week 7x7, aim for tasks averaging 60–90 minutes. Fourteen of those is a realistic clan event.
Write more variety than you think you need. Since most tiles go unplayed, a board with 49 distinct tasks gives every playthrough a different shape — and lets you reuse the same board next season without anyone noticing.
For task content, the 70+ tile ideas list works directly; sort by time-to-complete rather than by difficulty. The free board generator will produce a balanced task set you can lay out along the path.
Snakes and ladders generates its own specific arguments. Answer these before the start whistle:
The re-roll allowance is the one people forget. An all-ironman team landing on "buy 1,000 sharks" is stuck through no fault of their own, and a single published re-roll defuses it without an argument.
Nothing about the dice changes how you prove a task was done. Countable tasks (XP, kill counts, clue tiers) can be read from the hiscores; item drops need a RuneLite plugin or a screenshot; judgement tiles need an admin. The automatic tracking guide covers what each mechanism can actually see, and the drop verification guide covers the screenshot standard.
The one difference is urgency. In bingo, a slow approval means a team works a different tile. Here, a slow approval means a team cannot roll, so they do nothing at all. Approval latency is the single biggest quality factor in this format — more than the board, more than the tasks.
That is the practical argument for hosting the board rather than running it from a pinned Discord message: submissions land in a queue, approval unblocks the roll immediately, and position updates post to Discord without anyone editing anything. An OSRSHub server runs custom boards with teams, structured screenshot submissions, admin approval, and automatic Discord updates — $12.10 a month, live in under a minute. Want to sketch the tasks first? The board generator is free and needs no account.
5x5 (25 tiles) for a small clan over 3–5 days, 7x7 (49 tiles) for a medium clan over 1–2 weeks, 9x9 (81 tiles) only for large clans on roll-on-completion. A d6 averages 3.5 tiles per roll, so a 7x7 takes about 14 rolls to cross.
Roll-on-completion suits most clans: it removes dead time and time-zone unfairness. Daily rolls create a nice shared ritual but leave fast teams idle for hours and punish anyone whose day does not line up with the roll window.
Only the tile you land on. This is what makes snakes and ladders quicker per tile than a straight tile race, and why the boards are longer to compensate.
On a 49-tile board, about five ladders and four snakes, with ladders slightly stronger so the mechanic compresses the field. Keep every jump to 3–6 tiles and never place a snake in the last 15% of the board.
You should not require it. Exact-finish rules create a frustrating tail where a team rolls for days trying to hit one specific number while everyone waits. Let an overshoot win.
Get three things right and this format runs itself: a board size matched to your roll cadence, uniform task lengths within each third, and fast approvals. Everything else is flavour.
If you are choosing between formats, the tile race guide compares path events to bingo directly, and the board setup guide covers grids if you decide a classic bingo suits your clan better.