Eat, grow, don't crash
Use the arrow keys or WASD to steer the snake around the grid. Each time the snake eats the red food pellet it grows one segment longer and you score 10 points. The game ends when the snake runs into a wall or into its own body.
On mobile, swipe in the direction you want to go. You can pause at any time with Space or P. The snake speeds up slightly every 5 food eaten, so the challenge grows as your score does.
Snake is one of the most played games in history. The concept dates to the 1976 arcade game Blockade, but the version most people remember came pre-installed on Nokia mobile phones in 1997. Designed by Taneli Armanto, it shipped on the Nokia 6110 and went on to reach an estimated 350 million devices. For many people it was the first video game they ever played.
The rules are simple enough to learn in ten seconds but the game gets genuinely difficult as the snake fills the board and your own body becomes the main obstacle. At maximum length, every move matters. The theoretical maximum score requires navigating the snake along every cell in a perfect Hamiltonian path, which most players never achieve but many spend hours chasing.
Variants of the game have appeared on almost every platform since: arcade machines, home computers, graphing calculators, web browsers, and phones. The core loop, grow longer, avoid yourself, has never needed changing.
Yes. The snake gets slightly faster every 5 food pellets you eat. It starts at a comfortable pace and becomes challenging at higher scores, but it never reaches a point where it is too fast to control with careful play.
The grid is 20 by 20, giving 400 squares. If you filled every square the snake would be 400 segments long and you would have eaten 399 pellets at 10 points each, for a score of 3,990. Reaching that requires a perfect Hamiltonian path and no mistakes. In practice, scores above 500 are already excellent.
Yes. On mobile, swipe in the direction you want to go and the snake will turn. The game works in any mobile browser without a download or account.
Yes. Press Space or P on a keyboard to pause and resume. On mobile the game can be paused by tapping the pause button that appears during play.
If you like Snake, try SameGame for another solo puzzle challenge, or Achtung, die Kurve for a fast multiplayer game with a similar avoid-your-own-trail mechanic. For something to play with a friend, Tic Tac Toe and Rock Paper Scissors both have online multiplayer.