It's amusing how this game, by avoiding cubical dice and requiring knowledge of city names and populations to advance, is firmly on the side of "skill: good, luck: bad" for didactic games, while Moksha Patam, the precursor of Snakes & Ladders, was deliberately employed to teach the opposite lesson, "skill: useless, destiny: everything".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snakes_and_ladders#History