| ↑ ↓ ← → | Steer the snake. You cannot reverse directly into your own neck. |
| W A S D | Alternative steering keys. |
| Swipe | On a touchscreen, swipe anywhere on the board to turn. |
| On-screen pad | The four-way pad below the board does the same job on phones. |
| Start / Pause | Begin a run, or freeze it without losing your length. |
Snake is the game that came preinstalled on a generation of phones, and it survives because the rules fit in one sentence: eat, grow, and do not run into yourself. Every apple you swallow adds a segment to your tail, which means every point you score also makes the board more dangerous. The game is its own difficulty curve.
This version keeps the forgiving variant of the rules. The walls are open, so a snake that leaves the right edge reappears on the left, and the only thing that can kill you is your own body. That single change turns the board from a shrinking box into a torus you can loop around, and it rewards players who think about the whole grid instead of just the space in front of the head.
The single biggest improvement most players can make is to stop chasing the apple in a straight line. Move in wide loops around the outside of the board and let the apple come to you. A direct dash across the middle leaves your tail cutting the grid in half, and half a grid is where snakes die.
Once your tail is long, treat it as a wall you built yourself. Before you commit to a turn, look at where the tail will be two or three moves from now, not where it is right now. The segments closest to the head move away as you travel, so a gap that looks sealed is often open by the time you reach it.
Late in a run, the safest pattern is to follow your own tail in a tight spiral, tightening or loosening the loop to burn time until the apple spawns somewhere reachable. It feels passive, but a snake that survives an awkward apple placement scores more than one that lunges for it and boxes itself in.
Because the edges wrap, the border is the most valuable real estate on the board. Hugging an edge costs you nothing and keeps the open middle available as an escape route. Players who learn to use the wrap deliberately, entering one side to arrive somewhere useful on the other, pick up a surprising amount of extra length.
No. The playfield wraps around, so leaving one edge brings you back in on the opposite side. Only running into your own tail ends the run.
Ten points per apple. Your best score is stored in your own browser, so it is still there when you come back on the same device.
Yes. You can swipe anywhere on the board to change direction, or use the four-way pad underneath it. The fullscreen button gives you a larger playfield on small screens.
There is no ending. The board is 20 by 20 cells, so the theoretical maximum is filling every square with snake, which almost nobody reaches. In practice you are playing against your own previous best.
No. Snake runs entirely inside this page, so it starts the moment the page opens. There is nothing to download, no plugin, and no account to create.