🐍 Snake Online

Classic snake: arrow keys or swipe, chase your high score solo or take turns with 2-8 players

👥 1+ players🕹️ Casual Classics⚡ No download · No sign-up

🐍 Classic Snake

Score 0Best 0Length 3🧱 Walls⚡ Classic

Arrow keys / swipe to steer, eat 🍎 to grow

Don't hit the walls or yourself

🕹️ How to play

Press start; the snake moves on its own: After you press Start, the snake keeps moving in its current direction automatically. You don't press to move it forward — you just change its direction at the right moment.
Steer with arrow keys or swipe: On desktop use arrow keys or WASD; on mobile swipe on the board toward your target or tap the on-screen D-pad. You can't reverse 180° (pressing left while going right is ignored), or you'd crash into your own neck.
Eat food to grow, score, and speed up: Aim the head at the pink food 🍎 to eat it: the snake grows a segment, you gain a point, and new food appears in a random empty cell. Every 5 foods the speed steps up, so it gets more intense as you go.
Avoid walls and yourself; chase the best score: Hitting a wall (classic mode) or your own body ends the run and shows your score. Beating your local best triggers a 'new record' celebration; play again or switch to pass-the-phone to crown the Snake King.

📖 Rules & variants

Basics: a 20×20 grid, the snake starts as 3 cells centered facing right, advancing one cell per fixed tick. When the head enters the food cell it 'eats': the body grows one segment, score +1, and new food is drawn at random from the empty cells; otherwise the tail shrinks by one so length stays constant, creating the motion. Score equals foods eaten (= length minus 3).

Speed-up: every 5 foods the tick shortens by one step, down to a floor of 70 ms per cell. Speed only increases — the longer the snake, the faster it moves, which is the source of Snake's rising tension and the main difficulty in scoring high.

Turning & anti-suicide: legal directions are up/down/left/right, but a 180° reversal of your current heading is banned (pressing 'left' while going right is ignored). Turns are buffered: within one tick only the last legal input is kept, and legality is judged against the last committed direction — so a fast double-tap (e.g. up then left while going right) can't force an instant reversal.

Boundary modes (in settings): classic 'walls' ends the run when the head leaves the grid; 'wrap' lets the head exit one side and re-enter the opposite side, so you never die on a wall — more relaxed. Speed presets are Chill / Classic / Fast, mapping to different starting ticks; auto speed-up still applies.

Ending & clearing: hitting a wall or your own body ends the run, distinguishing 'hit the wall' from 'bit yourself'. In the rare case the snake fills the whole board with no empty cell left for food, it's a 'perfect clear' with a golden celebration. Refreshing the page restarts a run; in-progress games are not saved.

Pass-the-phone contest (party variant): switch to contest mode, enter 2–8 players, and each takes a turn on one phone; when all are done they're ranked highest score first with the 'Snake King' highlighted. Contest scores live only in this session — never written to local storage, never networked.

❓ FAQ

How do you play Snake?

After you press start, the snake moves forward on its own and you use arrow keys or swipes to change its direction toward the food. Each food grows the snake by one segment and adds a point while speeding it up slightly; hitting a wall or your own body ends the run. The goal is to eat as much as possible as the snake gets longer and faster without crashing.

How do you control Snake with the keyboard?

On desktop use the arrow keys (↑↓←→) or WASD to turn, and the space bar to pause or resume. On mobile just swipe anywhere on the board toward your target, or tap the on-screen D-pad below it. You can never reverse 180° — for example, pressing 'left' while moving right is ignored so you don't instantly crash into yourself.

What happens when Snake bites itself?

The run ends immediately and the score is shown, with the result telling you whether you 'hit a wall' or 'bit yourself'. The longer the snake, the easier it is to clip your own body on a sharp turn, so scoring high is about leaving an escape route and not coiling yourself in. Wrap mode avoids wall deaths, but biting your own body still ends the run.

How do you get a high score in Snake?

Hug the edges in a back-and-forth 'lawnmower' path, keeping your body on the outer ring and leaving the middle open to grab food; once you're long, take the long way rather than a rushed shortcut turn — most deaths come from a hasty reversal while chasing the last cell. To practice steadily, try Chill speed or Wrap mode first, then switch to classic walls to chase a high score.

Can you beat Snake? Is there an ending?

There is a theoretical end: when the snake fills the entire 20×20 grid and there's no empty cell left for food, it's a 'perfect clear' with a golden celebration. That requires a 400-segment snake with almost no mistakes and is extremely hard, so nearly everyone plays to keep breaking their own local high score instead.

When was Snake made, and who invented it?

Snake's gameplay traces back to the 1976 arcade game Blockade, which spawned many similar titles. What made it a household name was Nokia bundling 'Snake' into its phones in 1997, turning it into a defining memory for a generation. Today it remains one of the most iconic casual games, playable anytime right in the browser.

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⚠️ A pure front-end web game: gameplay never needs the network, high scores stay on your device, for casual fun only.

Last updated: 2026-07-20 · Saved on this device only