en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyan_chauper

The named game "The new game of virtue rewarded and vice punished for the amusement of youth of both sexes" is catalogued by the State Library of South Australia with the date [1818], not 1918. A second source, from the Museum of Anthropology at UBC, says the late-19th-century British adoption of the Indian game drew on an existing Protestant tradition of morality games based on "Virtue Rewarded" and "Vice Punished". ETH Library likewise states that the first game actually bearing the English title "Snakes and Ladders" was published in England in 1892. So the article's date is off by a century, and the sentence reverses the historical sequence: the morality game tradition was already present before English Snakes and Ladders appeared.

A catalogue record from Cambridge's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology describes a Gyan Chapar / Snakes and Ladders board and preserves a letter stating that General Richard Charles Lawrence "brought [it] back from India in 1857". The same museum page also cites published research saying the board was collected in the 1850s. That means the game had reached England decades before the 1890s.

UBC's Museum of Anthropology says that after the British adopted the game in the late 19th century, "By the early 1900s the inscriptions had disappeared and the playing area became a simple numbered track." ETH Library likewise says the first English Snakes and Ladders appeared in 1892, and shortly afterwards it was followed by the square-board version still familiar today. Those sources contradict the article's claim that simplified numbered boards only emerged in the 1940s because of wartime economic slowdown.