An online version with a vocabulary/reading element, created for non-English speakers learning English. (Warning: It's British English, but that makes it fun.)

SOME UNUSUAL GAMEBOARDS:

Sleds and Toboggans (c.1895) for sale (too expensive) as a poster at art.com. They must've scored a French printshop warehouse from 100 years ago, because they have several game boards being sold as posters. Click on the "zoom" to see it larger, and this site doesn't seem to mind people downloading the art and using it on their computers.

They also have one from the turn of the century (not THIS century, 19th to 20th) with cats, which I own as a piece of wrapping paper I had laminated. If anyone sees the sleds and toboggans as wrapping paper, please e-mail me!

History and Origins: Moksha-Patamu (Snakes and Ladders)
There's more, but this is interesting:

The game is Hindu and was used to teach children about the religion in that the good squares allow a player to ascend higher in the league of life whereas evil will reduce a player back through reincarnation to lower tiers of life. Presumably the last square, 100, represents Nirvana.

The morality of the game must have appealed to the Victorians, who took to the game when it was published in 1892 in England. Called Snakes and Ladders, the game play was pretty much the same but some of the vices and virtues were renamed according to Victorian ideals.

Board Game Geek has a page on this game, and just about every other boardgame you could think of.

Here's a comment on the back and forth direction:

Because books were mainly read out loud, the letters that composed them did not need to be separated into phonetic unities, but were strung together in continuous sentences. The direction in which the eyes were supposed to follow these reels of letters varied from place to place and from age to age; the way we read a text today in the Western world-from left to right and from top to bottom-is by no means universal. Some scripts were read from right to left (Hebrew and Arabic), others in columns, from top to bottom (Chinese and Japanese); a few were read in pairs of vertical columns (Mayan); some had alternate lines read in opposite directions, back and forth-a method called boustrophedon, "as an ox turns to plough", in ancient Greek.Yet others meandered across the page like a game of Snakes and Ladders, the direction being signalled by lines or dots (Aztec).

Alberto Manguel, Chapter 2 of A History of Reading (New York; Viking, 1996). The Silent Readers

I was recently looking up the history of one of my beloved games Snakes & Ladders when I came across your website.

I am sending you a photo of a snakes and ladders game that I own. From the type of materials used to make the board I don't think it is older than around 1970 but I do love the graphics because they are probably a reproduction of an original board which to me looks likes a style from the 1920's or 1930's. On the back it looks like the game parcheesi but there are no marks or writing to indicate who made the board or when.

Its especially nice because it carries the Victorian idea that you mention about vices and virtues. You'll notice some of the photos-16 for example where the two boys are wrestling and the snake takes you to 6 which show them both with injuries. I also love 62-the boy is smoking and the snake takes you to 19 and shows him sick. My daughter and I have played this game since she was around 4 years old (she is now 15) and we love it!

click for larger image