Classic Snake on a walled board: eat food to grow five blocks at a time and avoid the walls and your own tail. Five speeds, swipe or on-screen pad on phones.
What is Snake?
Snake is a classic arcade game in which you steer a snake around a walled board to eat food, growing longer with every bite, while avoiding the walls and your own body. The snake never stops moving. You only choose where it turns, and the longer it gets, the less room you have left.
A round can last thirty seconds or half an hour. The controls are four directions, but staying alive with a long snake is a question of planning routes several turns ahead.
How to play Snake
The board is a grid surrounded by a wall. Your snake starts near the top-left corner as a single block. Press a direction, or swipe, to start moving. One piece of food sits on a free cell of the board at all times.
Steering: the snake moves one cell per step in its current direction. You can turn left or right, but not straight back into yourself; a 180-degree turn is ignored. The game remembers up to two turns pressed in quick succession, so a fast up-then-left is carried out step by step.
Eating and growing: when the head reaches the food, the snake grows by five blocks, added over the next few steps, and new food appears on a random free cell. Your score is the snake's length.
Losing: the game ends if the head runs into the wall or into any part of the body. The tail moves out of its cell before the head moves in, so you may follow your own tail closely without crashing.
Winning: if the snake fills the board so that there is no free cell left for food, you win. On a full-size board that takes a very long snake.
Snake game strategy
Stay near the edges early. Moving along the walls keeps the middle of the board open, and open space is what you need later. Cutting through the centre splits the board into two halves, and one of them often becomes a trap.
Remember the growth delay. Each food adds five blocks over the next steps, and while the snake is still growing, its tail does not move. A gap that the tail would normally clear stays blocked for a few steps after you eat. Do not plan an escape through the cell your tail is sitting on right after a bite.
Never enter a pocket you cannot leave. Before turning into a space enclosed by your body and the wall, count its cells. If the pocket is smaller than your snake and its only exit is where you came in, you will not get out in time.
Use a sweep pattern when the snake is long. Moving in back-and-forth rows across the board, while keeping one column free along the side as a return lane, means the snake follows its own path and never closes itself in. It is slower, but at high lengths it is the reliable way to keep going.
Let the food wait. If the food sits inside a loop of your body, circle around until the body moves away. Rushing toward it is how most long runs end.
Use the turn memory for tight corners. Press the two turns of a U-turn quickly one after the other, and the snake will take them on consecutive steps, which helps at the higher speeds.
Snake speeds and variants
Our Snake has five speeds: Easy, Medium, Hard, Impossible and Rush. The first four keep a fixed pace, from 100 milliseconds per step on Easy down to 25 on Impossible. Rush starts slower than Easy and gets 5 milliseconds faster with every piece of food, so it begins gently and ends very fast. On touch screens every speed runs at half pace, since swiping is slower than pressing a key. Medium is the default.
Other variants exist, such as boards without walls where the snake comes out on the opposite side, levels with obstacles, and multiplayer versions. Ours keeps the classic walled board.
History of the Snake game
The idea goes back to the arcade game Blockade from 1976, in which two players steered lines that left a trail behind them. Many home computer versions followed. Snake became known around the world when it was preinstalled on Nokia mobile phones from 1997, and for many people it was the first game they ever played on a phone.
Playing Snake on Hevagames
Snake on Hevagames runs in the browser on phones and computers, with no download. On a keyboard, steer with the arrow keys or W, A, S, D, and press Space to pause. On a phone, swipe anywhere on the board; one long drag can make several turns. There is also an on-screen direction pad, shown by default on touch screens, that you can switch on or off.
The board size follows your screen and stays the same if you rotate it mid-game. The game pauses by itself when you switch tabs. Your best length and your chosen speed are saved on your device, and the game follows the light or dark theme.
How to play
- 1Press Play, then press an arrow key, swipe or tap a direction to start moving.
- 2Each piece of food makes the snake five blocks longer. Your score is the snake's length.
- 3Running into the wall around the board or into your own body ends the game.
- 4Pick a speed before you start: Easy, Medium, Hard, Impossible or Rush, which starts slow and gets faster with every piece of food.
Controls
Tips
- You can press the next turn a moment early: up to two turns are queued.
- Moving into the cell your tail is just leaving is safe, except while the snake is still growing after a meal.
- Turn the on-screen pad on or off with the cross button at the top.