Snake

How to play

You control a line of squares that never stops moving. The head travels one cell per step in whichever direction you last chose, and the rest of the body follows the path the head took, like a train on track it lays down itself. Somewhere on the grid sits a single piece of food. Drive the head onto it and the body grows by one cell, your food count goes up by one, and a new piece appears in a cell the snake does not currently occupy.

There are only two ways to end a run. The first is crossing your own body, which is fatal at any length. The second is hitting a wall, and whether that is possible depends on the wrap-through-walls option below the board. That option is on by default: the head slides off the right edge and returns on the left, off the top and back at the bottom. Uncheck it and the four edges become solid, which is the stricter version of the game and the one most people picture when they think of Snake on an old phone.

Speed is yours to pick and it never changes on its own. Calm, Normal, Fast and Silly run at roughly eight, twelve, eighteen and twenty-six steps per second. Each speed stores its own best score in this browser, so improving your Normal record does not quietly overwrite the Fast one. Switching speeds starts a new run, because a score built at one step rate says nothing about another.

Controls

• Keyboard: arrow keys or W A S D to turn. The space bar pauses and resumes, and starts a new run once you have died.
• Mouse: the buttons above the board handle pausing and restarting; the speed control and the wrap checkbox sit below it. Clicking the board gives it keyboard focus.
• Touch: swipe up, down, left or right anywhere on the board. Short swipes work fine, so you do not need to drag across the whole screen.
• Queued turns: two quick inputs are both remembered, so a fast right-then-up around a corner does what you meant instead of dropping the second press.

Strategy for longer runs

Early on, use the edges. When the body is short there is nothing to trap you, and the temptation is to cut diagonal staircases across the middle of the board chasing each new piece of food. That habit leaves your body coiled through the centre, which is exactly the region you need later. Instead, hug the outer ring: travel along a wall, take food that appears near your path, and keep the middle of the grid as clean open space you can spend when the snake is long. A tidy first thirty seconds is worth more than a fast one.

Every turn you make should leave you an exit. Before committing the head into a pocket, look at the cell you plan to reach and ask which way you will leave it. If the answer is a single opening, and your own tail is drifting toward that opening, do not enter. This is the difference between a run that ends at length twenty and one that ends at sixty: good players are not reacting to the food, they are reading the shape of the empty space and refusing to enter any region with only one way out.

Once the body is long, stop improvising and start sweeping. The reliable pattern is a back-and-forth walk, sometimes called a boustrophedon after the way an ox ploughs a field: run down one column to the far wall, step sideways one cell, run back up the next column, and repeat across the board. It looks slow and it feels slow, but it visits every cell in a fixed order, which means the food always ends up in front of you and your tail is always the cell you are furthest from re-entering. A disciplined sweep is how the very long snakes stay alive; wrap-around helps here, because sliding through an edge saves you the turn at the end of each column.

Expect the last fifth of the board to be where runs die. When roughly eighty per cent of the cells are body, the empty space stops being one open region and becomes a corridor, and a corridor punishes the smallest hesitation. Two habits help. Keep your turns as far from your own tail as possible, since the tail is the one part of the body that will be gone by the time you arrive. And when the food spawns inside a pocket you cannot safely enter, ignore it for a lap, finish your sweep, and take it on the next pass when the tail has cleared the way.

Where the game came from

The idea is older than home computers. Arcade cabinets of the late 1970s already had games built on a line that grows behind you and kills you if you touch it, and the concept spread through home machines, terminals and calculators for the next two decades under a dozen different names. What turned it into a habit for millions of people was mobile phones: Nokia handsets of the late 1990s shipped a version that everybody had, everybody understood in ten seconds, and everybody played while waiting for something else to happen.

The version on this page is written from scratch for Boss Games, in plain JavaScript with no libraries and no external requests. The wording on this page is ours as well. We kept the rules unchanged because the rules are the appeal, and added only what makes a browser version pleasant: four selectable speeds, per-speed records held on your device, queued turns, a proper pause, and colours read from the site theme so the board follows light or dark mode. Food positions come from your browser's cryptographic random source through an unbiased selection over the free cells, so no square is quietly favoured.

Questions players ask