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Snake

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About Snake

Snake is a true video game legend — a game so simple and so perfect that it has entertained players for decades. You steer a snake around the board, eating food to grow longer. The catch is that every bite makes you a bigger obstacle to yourself, so survival gets harder the better you do.

There is no finish line in Snake; the only goal is to beat your own best score. As your snake stretches across the board, every turn needs planning so you do not trap yourself in a corner or curl into your own tail. It is the original "just one more go" game, and it plays beautifully in the browser on any device.

What makes the modern browser version of Snake feel just as fresh as the 1997 Nokia original is how cleanly the rules translate across decades. Four directional inputs, one moving snake, one piece of food on the board at a time. There is no power creep, no microtransactions, no level progression — just you against the previous version of you. That purity is exactly why Snake remains one of the most recognised and replayed games in history, and why it works equally well on a phone, tablet or desktop.

This version of Snake supports both arrow keys on desktop and swipe controls on mobile. Your best length is saved locally so each session has a personal target to chase. The board is a fair size — large enough to give you space to think but small enough to feel pressure as you grow. The restart is instant, which matters in a game where most runs end in a single careless turn.

— How to play

How to play Snake

Arrow keys or WASD to move
Eat the red food to grow
Do not hit walls or your own tail

— Controls

Snake controls

Desktop (mouse & keyboard)

Use arrow keys, WASD, the mouse or spacebar where the game requires it. Specific controls match the "How to play" steps above — each step describes the exact input the game expects.

Mobile (touchscreen)

Tap, hold, swipe or drag — whichever your finger naturally does for the action described in the steps. Snake is mobile-first and works in portrait or landscape on any modern phone or tablet.

— Strategy & tips

How to win

Travel along the walls to keep the open middle free.
Move in calm, predictable patterns instead of zig-zagging.
Always plan an exit before you head toward the food.
As the snake grows, leave yourself an escape route at all times.
Slow down mentally — most crashes come from rushing a turn.
Build a "comb" path along the edges so your tail naturally clears as you eat.
When the snake fills most of the board, switch from chasing food to maintaining safe loops.
Resist the urge to cut diagonally toward food. The straight path that uses one extra step is usually the path that does not kill you.

— Game features

Why you'll love it

The timeless arcade classic
Keyboard and swipe controls
Score saving to chase your best
Free to play, no sign-up

— Origin & history

The story behind Snake

The Snake game format is older than most players realise. It originated as Blockade, a two-player arcade game released by Gremlin Industries in 1976. The single-player variant became famous when Nokia bundled a version of Snake on the Nokia 6110 in 1997 — instantly making it the first mobile game ever played by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. That Nokia version is what cemented Snake into popular culture: countless commuters, students and office workers spent the late 1990s and early 2000s mastering it during boring moments, and many people who do not consider themselves "gamers" still remember their Nokia high score by heart. The browser version you are playing keeps the same elegant rules that have entertained players for almost half a century.

— Advanced strategy

Master-level Snake

The deepest single concept in Snake mastery is the idea of a "Hamiltonian path" — a route through every cell of the board that returns to its starting point. You do not need the math to play well, but the intuition matters enormously: once your snake takes up more than about a third of the board, the only way to keep eating safely is to follow a long, looping path that visits empty space in a predictable order. Top players essentially fold the snake into a rectangular comb shape, slowly sweeping back and forth across rows. The food still appears randomly, but the comb pattern means there is always a safe way to deviate, grab the food, and return to the pattern without trapping yourself.

The second piece of advanced play is anticipating food spawn behaviour. Food cannot spawn on a cell occupied by your snake, so as your length grows, the food is statistically more likely to appear in the larger empty regions of the board. Reading where those regions are — and steering your head toward them in advance — saves you the long, dangerous detour of crossing the entire board at maximum length. Combined with the comb pattern, this gives you a method that scales all the way to "perfect runs" where the snake fills the entire board, the legendary outcome that only a small fraction of players ever achieve.

— Frequently asked questions

Snake FAQ

What is the highest possible score in Snake?

The theoretical maximum is filling the entire board with your snake — a perfect run. On a standard board that means scoring roughly the total number of cells minus your starting length. In practice, almost no one reaches that ceiling because maintaining a safe path becomes extraordinarily difficult once the snake covers more than two-thirds of the board. Most strong players plateau in the 100 to 300 length range; reaching 500 puts you in the top tier of players.

Why does the snake speed up?

Many versions of Snake increase scroll speed as your length grows. The reason is design balance — without acceleration, the game would become trivially easy in the late stages when a skilled player has internalised the comb pattern. Speed acceleration keeps the difficulty curve honest and ensures that a high score requires both planning and consistent execution under increasing pressure. Some browser versions keep a constant speed instead, which makes raw length the only challenge.

Can I go through walls?

It depends on the variant. The classic Nokia Snake ended your run the moment you touched a wall. Some modern variants allow wrap-around so leaving one side brings you in on the opposite side. The browser version you are playing follows classic rules — walls are deadly — which is the format that rewards long-term strategy the most, because every direction change has real spatial consequences for the rest of the run.

— Strategy guides

Read our Snake guides

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