Play the Classic Snake Game Online

Snake is the game of one apple and one growing tail: every apple makes the snake a cell longer, and the longer it gets, the less room it has to turn. Surviving is only half of it: cover every free cell to fill the board and win, and your fastest fill is kept. A second snake can join you on the same field too, played by the computer or by someone sharing your keyboard.

How to play Snake: the rules

Steer the snake to the apple, grow one cell with each apple, and keep the head out of the walls and your own body. Each apple counts one point.

The snake starts three cells long on the left of the field and does not move until you choose a direction, so you can look at the board first. From then on it advances one cell per step without stopping. Arrow keys or WASD steer on a computer. Space, P or Esc pauses, and the game also pauses by itself when you switch tabs.

On a phone you swipe anywhere over the board, so your thumb never has to cover the snake. The turn happens while your finger is still moving, so a single L-shaped stroke gives you two turns. If you would rather press buttons, use the round button in the bottom-right corner, or set Steer to D-pad in Settings: four diamond arrows take the place of the swipe guide under the board, and you can keep your thumb down and slide it from one arrow to the next to turn again without lifting it. The round buttons on either side stay put: New game and Settings on the left, Pause and the steering switch on the right.

Two details decide many games:

• Quick double turns are kept. If you press up and then left before the snake has moved, it goes up on the next step and left on the one after. Up to two turns wait in line, which makes a tight U-turn reliable.
• The tail moves out of the way. You can steer into the cell your tail is leaving on that same step. The exception is the step on which you eat, because the snake grows and the tail stays where it is.

Can the snake go through the walls?

Only with Wrap turned on. Then leaving the right edge brings the head back on the left, and the same top to bottom. With Wrap off, touching the edge ends the game. Maze walls are solid in both cases.

Speeds, fields and mazes

Pick the speed, the field and Wrap in the settings. Slow moves 6 cells a second, Medium 8 and Fast 12, and the speed never creeps up as you grow, so a score of 40 on Medium always means the same thing. Changing a setting begins a fresh game, with a quick check first if you have already eaten something.

The five mazes are where routes matter. Corners sets an L-shaped wall near each corner, Bars lays two long walls across the middle and Pillars scatters five short blocks. Tunnel walls in the top and bottom edges and Fence all four, each leaving gaps that lead through to the far side only with Wrap on.

The look comes in six skins, rounded snakes in Meadow, Night and Candy and square-celled ones in Blocks, Retro and Neon, and switching never disturbs the game in progress. Retro moves in hard one-cell jumps, like an old phone screen.

How to win at Snake by filling the whole board

A fill means the snake covers every free cell, and the reliable way to get one is to stop chasing apples and follow one fixed loop that passes through every cell before returning to where it started. As long as the head stays on that loop, the body can never block it, however long it grows.

The simplest loop on an open field is a comb. Keep the top row as a corridor, then sweep the rest of the field down one column and up the next, and come back along the corridor. On the medium field that is 16 columns of 14 cells under a 16-cell top row, which works because the field is an even number of columns wide. On a board with an odd number of cells, such as a 17×15 grid, no closed loop through every cell exists without wrap, and the last few apples come down to luck. Every field here, mazes included, has been checked to have a loop with Wrap on and off.

Following the loop from the first apple is slow. Take shortcuts while the snake is short, and settle into the loop once it covers about a third of the field. Two habits keep a shortcut safe:

1. Never let the open space split into two pockets. If a turn would cut a pocket off, the apple will eventually land there.
2. Before diving toward the apple, check that you can still reach your tail afterward. The tail is the one place guaranteed to keep opening up.

Your records keep the best score and the fastest fill for every speed, field and Wrap combination, so the small field on Slow is a fair place to try your first fill.

Playing Snake against the computer or a friend

Set Rival to Computer and a second snake starts on the other side of the field, after the same apple at the same speed. It has three levels, Easy, Medium and Hard, and plays strictly by your rules. It moves one cell per step and only reacts to where your snake actually is, never to a key you have pressed but your snake has not followed yet. On a computer you can also pick Player 2, who steers with WASD while you keep the arrow keys.

A rival changes how a game ends:

• If one snake runs into a wall, itself or the other snake, the other one wins.
• It is a draw when both heads reach the same cell, when they pass through each other, or when the two snakes crash on one step.
• A clock runs: 2 minutes on Small, 3 on Medium and the mazes, 4 on Large. When it reaches zero the longer snake wins, so being ahead late in the game is a reason to play safe.

When the other snake is nearer the apple, racing it there rarely pays. Cut across its route instead and let it run short of room, since a snake boxed against a wall or a maze corner has to crash sooner or later. Keep your own head a cell away from the other one whenever you can, because a head-on crash throws away a lead.

How is this different from the Google Snake game?

The core is the same game. On a computer, Google's small and large boards are 10×9 and 24×21, the same as the small and large fields here; on a phone it sizes the board to fit the screen instead. What differs is the medium field, 16×15 so that it can be filled, plus the mazes, the rival snake and the record of fastest fills. There are no portals, keys or extra fruit modes; one apple at a time is the whole game.

For another game about eating your way bigger, try Fish Eat Fish, where you grow by catching smaller fish and dodging the larger ones.