🐍 Snake

The board, the start and the one rule that kills you

Snake is played on a 21 by 21 grid: 441 squares. You start three segments long in the dead centre, already sliding right, so the clock is ticking the moment you press Play (or Space, or Enter). The head is ten squares from the right wall, and at the opening pace of one step every 150 milliseconds that gives you just over a second and a half before your first crash if you do nothing.

There is no wraparound. Leave the grid on any side and the run is over, exactly like hitting your own body. There is also no pause button, so if you need a break, finish the run first.

One food sits on the board at a time, and it always appears on a random empty square, never under your body. Eat it and you grow one segment, a new food appears somewhere else, and the game gets a little faster.

Scoring and speed, in real numbers

Every food is worth exactly 10 points. No combos, no bonuses, no multipliers: your score is simply food eaten times ten. A 200 means 20 meals and a snake 23 segments long.

Speed is where the difficulty lives. Each meal cuts 3 milliseconds off the step time, from 150 down to a hard floor of 70. That floor arrives on your 27th food, at 270 points. After that the snake never gets faster, it only gets longer.

• 0 points: 150 ms per step, about 6.7 squares a second.
• 100 points: 120 ms, about 8.3 squares a second.
• 200 points: 90 ms, about 11 squares a second.
• 270 points and beyond: 70 ms, about 14 squares a second. Crossing the whole board takes under 1.5 seconds.

How the controls really behave

Steer with the arrow keys or W, A, S and D. Knowing three small details in the code will save you more lives than any reflex training.

• Reversing is ignored, not fatal. Pressing Left while moving right does nothing, so a panicked wrong key will not kill you on its own.
• Turns are buffered. The game remembers up to three queued turns and spends one per step. Moving right, tap Down then Left quickly and the snake drops one row and heads back the other way in two steps: a clean hairpin, even at top speed.
• Your tail square is safe. The tail moves out of its square on the same step the head moves in, so you can chase your own tail one square behind forever without dying. Food never spawns there, so that square never makes you grow into yourself.
• On a phone, the swipe registers after about 24 pixels and you do not need to lift your finger. Drag down then left in one stroke and you get the same hairpin as the keyboard.

Beginner mistakes

Almost every early death is one of these.

• Steering by the head only. The danger is the body you will meet in five steps, not the square in front of you.
• Heading straight for food that is beside your own body. You arrive, eat, grow by one, and find the only exit is the segment you just stretched past.
• Turning late along a wall. At 90 ms or faster you have already moved a square by the time your finger lands. Press as you pass the square before the turn and let the buffer do the timing.
• Spiralling inward. Coiling around the middle feels safe until the coil closes and the only open space is outside it.

Intermediate and advanced strategy

Up to roughly 25 segments, open play is fine: go for food directly but always keep a route back toward the empty half of the board. A simple check before each approach is to ask where you will go after the bite. If the answer is a dead end, approach from the other side.

Past about 60 segments, switch to lanes. Run full-length rows top to bottom in a zig-zag, using the buffered hairpin at each wall, and leave one column free down one side as your return corridor. Your body lies behind you in neat parallel rows, the head always moves into fresh space, and food that lands ahead of you gets collected on the sweep without any risky detour.

The trade-off is time versus safety. Lane-sweeping is slow, but speed stops climbing at 270 points, so a long game is a patience test rather than a reflex test. Cut across the lanes only when the food is close and the shortcut leaves the corridor open.

A neat piece of maths for perfectionists: 441 is odd, and a grid with an odd number of squares has no loop that visits every square exactly once. So no single repeating route can fill this board. To max it out you have to break your pattern near the end, and that is where most near-perfect runs die.

Where Snake came from

The idea of steering a growing line you must not cross goes back to the 1976 arcade game Blockade. The version most people picture is the one Nokia put on its phones from 1997, starting with the Nokia 6110, which turned a simple phone game into something millions of people played on the bus. This Snake keeps that feel: a square grid, one food, and nothing to blame but yourself.

Snake FAQ