Snake

How to play

You control a snake that never stops moving. Steer it into the orange food to grow one segment longer and score a point. Hit a wall or any part of your own body and the game ends.

The snake speeds up slightly for every four points, so the game that feels sedate at score 5 is genuinely demanding at score 40. That acceleration is the whole difficulty curve.

• On a phone, swipe on the board, or use the buttons.
• On a computer, the arrow keys.

You cannot reverse directly into yourself, so pressing left while moving right is ignored rather than fatal.

Strategy, which is mostly about space

Follow the walls early

While the snake is short, the instinct is to cut straight across the board to the food. Resist it. Every diagonal path you carve leaves your body in the middle of the board, and the middle is where you will need room later.

Better players hug the perimeter and move inward only to collect. It looks inefficient and it keeps the centre open.

Think about the space you are enclosing, not the food

This is the single idea that separates a score of 20 from a score of 60. Before you turn, ask whether that turn creates a pocket of empty squares that your own body will seal off. If it does, and you enter that pocket, you have already lost, even though nothing has hit anything yet.

The failure mode is always the same: you collect food inside a region you closed, and there is no exit.

Use a boustrophedon path when long

Once you are genuinely long, the reliable technique is to sweep the board in a snaking pattern, going along one row, dropping down, coming back along the next. It is slow and it guarantees you never trap yourself, because you always leave the row behind you empty.

Players who reach very high scores are essentially executing a Hamiltonian cycle, a route that visits every square exactly once and returns to the start. Follow that route and you cannot die. It is also extremely tedious, which is why most people take shortcuts and eventually pay for one.

Do not chase food into a corner

Food that appears in a corner while your tail is nearby is a trap. Sometimes the correct move is to circle and wait, taking a longer route so that your tail has cleared the exit by the time you arrive. Losing two seconds is better than losing the game.

Why the tail matters more than the head

Beginners watch the head. The head is the easy part, you are steering it. The thing that kills you is the tail, because it is where your body was several moves ago and it is retreating at exactly the same speed you are advancing.

This produces a genuinely useful trick: you can follow your own tail indefinitely and never crash, because the square it occupies will be empty by the time you reach it. If you are ever unsure what to do, get behind your own tail and think.

A little history

The concept dates to arcade games of the mid 1970s, but Snake became universal in 1997 when Nokia put it on the 6110. It was preinstalled on hundreds of millions of phones and, for a very large number of people, was the first video game they ever played. This version is a rebuild rather than a port, but the behaviour is deliberately close to what people remember.

Your best score is kept in your browser on your own device and is never uploaded.

Common questions