Snake
ActionHow to Play
Goal: Eat food and grow your snake as long as possible.
Controls: Use arrow keys (desktop) or swipe (mobile) to move. On mobile, tap the arrow buttons.
Rules: Don't hit the walls or your own body. Each food eaten increases your score. See how long you can survive.
About Snake
Snake is one of gaming's great survivors. The idea dates to the 1976 arcade game Blockade, but its immortality came in 1997, when Nokia shipped Snake on the 6110 and put a video game in hundreds of millions of pockets for the first time. For a generation, Snake on a monochrome phone screen was mobile gaming.
The rules are a perfect trap: eat food, grow longer, and die only by hitting the wall or yourself. Which means Snake is the rare game where your only enemy is your own past decisions, literally trailing behind you. Early game is free; late game, when the board is mostly snake, becomes a genuine planning puzzle about not sealing your own exits.
Snake late-game survival
- Sweep in an S-pattern (boustrophedon) across the board, it keeps your body organized and your exit predictable.
- Hug the walls early to keep the center open for maneuvering when you are long.
- Never enter a pocket of space smaller than your own length, check the way out before you take the food.
- Follow your own tail when trapped: the space behind your tail tip is the one spot guaranteed to open up.
- Slow your inputs as you grow. At length 50, one buffered double-tap into yourself ends what took ten minutes to build.
FAQ
What is the safest route pattern in Snake?
The lawnmower sweep: run full rows back and forth, turning at the edges, so your body always forms neat, predictable ribbons. Freestyling looks faster but creates the tangled pockets that kill long snakes. Boring routes are how big scores happen.
Why did I die when I doubled back quickly?
Reversing into your own neck is Snake's classic instant death, and quick successive key presses can queue a fatal turn before the first one renders. This version guards against direct reversals, but buffered double-turns are still the veteran-killer, deliberate inputs beat fast ones.
Can the board be completely filled?
In principle yes, a perfect snake can occupy nearly every cell using a fixed sweep cycle, and speedrunners chase exactly that. In practice random food placement forces detours, and every detour is a chance to strand yourself. Filling even half the board is a real achievement.
How do the mobile controls work?
Swipe anywhere on the board to turn, or use the on-screen D-pad, desktop uses the arrow keys. The snake moves on a fixed beat, so a turn is committed to the next tick; anticipate a step ahead rather than reacting on top of the tile.
