🐍 Classic Snake

How to Play

• On PC use the arrow keys (or WASD); on mobile use the on-screen direction buttons or swipe the canvas to steer the snake.
• Eating the red food grows your body by one, earns 1 point, and makes you move a little faster.
• Hitting a wall or your own body ends the game.
• You can't turn directly back the way you came (you would instantly hit your own body).

Snake's History & High-Score Tips

Snake began in 1970s arcade games and became a global hit when it shipped by default on late-1990s mobile phones, making it one of the most-played game genres in history. The rules are simple, but the difficulty rises naturally as your body grows and you must dodge the obstacle you created yourself. The secret to high scores is "space management." Rather than heading straight for the food by the shortest path, get into the habit of circling widely along the edges of the board so you keep a safe escape route even as you grow. Especially once your body exceeds half the board, a "boustrophedon" path that zigzags back and forth, filling one row at a time, is advantageous. One more thing: input your turns a beat early. This game applies your input on the next move, so pressing right at a corner can be too late. In the faster late game, viewing the whole screen and picturing two or three cells ahead is the key to survival.

Advanced: Wall-Hugging and Tail-Chasing

Two habits separate long snakes from short ones. The first is wall-hugging: travel along the outer edge of the board whenever you have no urgent reason to be in the middle. The border can never surprise you — it never moves — so a snake gliding along the wall only has to watch one side, and the open center stays free as an escape lane and as clean space for the next food to appear. The second habit is tail-chasing: when the board gets tight, following your own tail at a safe one-cell distance is surprisingly secure, because the tail cell always vacates on the very next move. A snake curled into a loop behind its own tail can wait out almost any awkward food position. Combine the two — patrol the wall in calm moments, coil behind your tail in crowded ones — and the panicky mid-board scrambles that end most runs simply stop happening. Practice each habit on its own for a few runs before mixing them, and watch your average score climb.

Fun Facts About Snake

The very first ancestor of Snake was the 1976 arcade game Blockade, a two-player duel of growing walls. But the version the whole world remembers arrived in 1997, when engineer Taneli Armanto built Snake into the Nokia 6110 mobile phone. Preloaded on hundreds of millions of handsets, it became one of the most widely distributed video games ever made — for many people, the first video game they ever touched. The genre never died: it returned as the massively multiplayer Slither.io in 2016 and still tops casual charts today. One last bit of trivia for the ambitious: a "perfect game" means filling every single cell of the board with your own body, at which point there is nowhere left for food to spawn. On this 20x20 board, that is a 400-segment snake. Good luck.