Movie: How Chutes & Ladders' Game Length Varies Over Time

This movie shows how the game (on average) evolves over time. Using the Pages shelf in Tableau is ideal for visualizing time-dependent processes like this. I used it to make a movie of the distribution of player position.

Here, each bar represents a game square, and the height of the bar represents how likely it is for a player to be on that square. (Disclosure notice: I’ve used a moving average and filter to smooth the animation easier to interpret; it makes things a little smoother, but doesn’t change the conclusion.)

As you can see, this distribution actually reaches a sort of steady state. Even though players are moving back and forth across the board, the likelihood of a square being occupied (given that the game hasn’t ended yet) is fairly constant.

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