The game was designed in 1948 by Eleanor Abbott, while she was recovering from polio in San Diego, California. The spinner includes all outcomes that were previously on the cards. The 2004 version changed the last space from a violet square to a rainbow space, meaning it applies to any color drawn by a player, thus resolving any dispute about exactly who wins the game.ДЄs of 2013, Candy Land is being sold by Hasbro with a spinner instead of cards. The official rules specify that any card that would cause the player to advance past the last square wins the game, but many play so that one must land exactly on the last square to win. The game is won by landing on or passing the final square and thus reaching the goal of the Candy Castle.

In the 2006 version, dot spaces were replaced with licorice spaces that prompt the player landing on it to simply lose the next turn. A player who lands on such a space is stuck (all cards are ignored until a card is drawn of the same color as the square). Two of these spaces were designated as 'cherry pitfalls' and the other was situated in Molasses Swamp. Prior to the 2006 ion, the board had three colored spaces marked with a dot. This move can be either forward or backward in the classic game backward moves can be ignored for younger players in the 2004 version of the game. The deck has one card for each named location, and drawing such a card moves a player directly to that board location. Some cards have two marks of a color, in which case the player moves the marker ahead to the second-next space of that color. Players take turns removing the top card from a stack, most of which show one of six colors, and then moving their marker ahead to the next space of that color. The remaining pink spaces are named locations such as Candy Cane Forest and Gumdrop Mountain, or characters such as Queen Frostine and Gramma Nutt. The board consists of a winding, linear track made of 134 spaces, most red, green, blue, yellow, orange or purple. The race is woven around a storyline about finding King Kandy, the lost king of Candy Land.

Candyland characters clip a