How to play
You steer a snake around a 17 × 17 grid and try to eat as much food as you can. Each piece you eat adds one square to the snake’s length and one point to your score, and a new piece appears at once on a random empty square. That is the whole loop. What makes it hard is that the snake never stops moving and your own body fills up the board behind you.
A game starts with a three-square snake in the middle of the grid, pointing right. Nothing moves until you give the first direction, so you can take a breath before you start.
Controls. Swipe on the board, tap the arrow buttons under it, or use the arrow keys. W, A, S and D work too. A turn takes effect on the snake’s next step, not the instant you press. Pressing the direction you are already heading does nothing, and a turn straight back into your own neck is ignored.
Quick double turns. The game remembers up to two queued turns between steps. So if you are heading right and press up then left quickly, the snake goes up one square and then left, a tight U-turn. This is the move that saves you in corridors.
How a game ends. You lose by running the head into your own body. With Walls on, leaving the grid also ends the game. With Walls off, the snake slides out one edge and comes back in through the opposite one. You win if the snake fills every square of the board, which happens when it reaches length 289.
Pause. Press P, the space bar or the Pause button. The game also pauses itself when you switch tabs or the window loses focus, and an unfinished game is saved on this device. When you come back it is waiting, paused, at the same spot.
Speed and the Walls switch
The snake starts at one step every 200 milliseconds. After your 5th piece of food it speeds up to one step every 150 ms, and after the 10th it reaches its top speed of one step every 100 ms. It never gets faster than that. So the early game ramps quickly, and from a score of 10 onward the challenge comes from your length, not the clock.
The Walls button switches between the two board types. Its tooltip tells you which is on. Flipping it throws away the current game and starts a fresh one with the new setting, so pick before you begin. The setting itself is remembered for next time. Your Best score is a single number shared by both modes.
One detail about collisions that surprises people: you can move into the square your tail is leaving. On a step where you don’t eat, the tail moves out before the head arrives, so chasing your own tail at close range is perfectly safe. On a step where you do eat, the tail stays put, so the same move would kill you.
Strategy
Use the slow start. The first five pieces come at the gentlest speed. Use them to get into the habit of planning a turn or two ahead instead of reacting.
Don’t beeline for the food. Most deaths come from cutting straight across the board toward a piece and then finding no way out. Before turning toward food, look at where the head will be after eating and check that it has an exit.
Count the pocket. If you are about to enter an enclosed area, compare its size with your length. A pocket with fewer free squares than your snake is long is a trap unless your tail will open a door in time.
Run in rows once you’re long. Past length 40 or so, sweeping back and forth across the grid in tidy lanes keeps your body in straight, predictable lines. You lose some time on detours, but nothing on this board rewards speed. Only survival counts.
Follow your tail when stuck. Because the tail always vacates its square, hugging the tail is the one path that is always open. If you’re unsure, trail it and wait for the food to land somewhere reachable.
Practice with Walls off. Wrap-around removes edge deaths, so you can work on self-collision alone. Be careful that it also makes it easy to forget your body is waiting on the far side of the board.
For a puzzle with no clock at all, try Hidato, where you plan a path through every cell at your own pace.
If you enjoy Snake, try Snowball Siege or Stick Brawl next.
