How to play
You control direction and nothing else. The line moves one square per step whether or not you touch the keyboard, so there is no standing still and no safe square to think from. Each piece of food adds one segment to your length; running into a wall, when walls are solid, or into any part of your own body ends the run immediately.
Two numbers describe how you are doing and they are not the same thing. Food counts what you have eaten and is what the best score tracks. Length is how much board you are currently occupying, which is the real difficulty dial: at three segments the board is empty, at forty it is a maze you built yourself, and every turn has to account for where your tail will be by the time you arrive.
Controls
- Desktop: arrow keys or W A S D. Space pauses.
- Phone or tablet: swipe anywhere on the board; page scrolling is suppressed while you are over it.
- Turn buffer: up to three turns are queued, so a fast right-then-up both register instead of the second one being eaten.
The comb pattern, and why lucky runs are not repeatable
Most players die the same way: they chase food in straight lines toward wherever it appeared, the body ends up scattered across the middle of the board in loose curves, and eventually there is no route out of the shape they made. The fix is to stop treating each piece of food as a separate trip and start keeping the body in parallel lines.
The pattern players call the comb works like this. Travel the full height of one column, step sideways one square, travel back down the next column, and keep sweeping across the board. Food that appears anywhere in the columns ahead of you gets collected on the way past at no extra cost, and — this is the part that matters — your body is always laid out in neat vertical strips with a clear lane at the end of the sweep. You are never navigating a shape you cannot predict.
Pure comb sweeping is slow, so in practice you mix it: sweep when your length is high or the food is far, take the direct route when you are short and the food is close. The habit worth building is asking "where will my tail be when I get there", because the tail moves out of squares as fast as the head moves into them. A gap that looks closed frequently opens exactly as you arrive, and a gap that looks open closes the same way.
Targets we hit while playing each speed ourselves, so read them as estimates: on Normal, twenty food is a comfortable session and forty means your turns are planned rather than reacted to. On Silly, anything past fifteen is genuinely good, because at twenty-six steps per second you get about 38 milliseconds of thinking time per square.
What the wrap switch really changes
With wrap on — the default here — leaving the right edge puts you back on the left, and the top and bottom connect the same way. It sounds like a mercy setting and it is, for the first thirty seconds. Later it becomes a trap of a different kind: your tail can reappear on the opposite side of the board and block a lane you had mentally reserved, and the edges stop being reliable walls to press your body against.
With wrap off, the border kills you but the geometry is honest. Every experienced player we watched ended up preferring solid walls at high length, because the comb pattern depends on knowing that a column ends. If you want to see the difference immediately, play the same speed twice and compare how you die: with wrap on, it is almost always your own tail arriving from nowhere.
A short history of the growing line
This one predates the home computer. Gremlin put a two-player coin-op called Blockade in arcades in 1976, in which both players left a solid trail behind them until somebody crashed into one. The single-player, food-eating version circulated on almost every platform of the 1980s under a dozen names, and it became a household reflex in 1997 when Nokia shipped a version on the 6110 handset.
This implementation is our own, written for this site: a fixed-step loop that consumes time in whole steps so the snake moves at the same rate on a 60 Hz laptop and a 144 Hz monitor, and food placement taken from the browser's cryptographic random source, filtered through a rejection loop so that no square is quietly favoured. None of the code or the text here is copied from another release.
Questions players ask
Does turning off wrap make it harder?
Early on, yes — a mistimed turn at an edge ends the run. At high length it is usually easier, because solid borders make your own body predictable.
Why does each speed have its own best score?
They are different games. Calm gives you room to plan two turns ahead; Silly is pure reaction. One combined number would hide your progress, so all four are stored separately on your device.
Is there a maximum length?
576 segments, the whole 24 by 24 grid. Nobody is getting there by hand. Past 60 you have already solved the hard part: moving through a board full of yourself.