How to Play Snake, from Basics to Advanced Techniques

A single snake crawls nonstop across a grid. The only thing the player does is turn it; you cannot stop it or send it backward. Eating food makes the body one cell longer, and that longer body immediately becomes an obstacle for the next moment. The better you play, the tighter the board gets, which makes winning and trapping yourself two sides of the same coin.

Its origin is believed to be the 1976 arcade board Blockade, a two-player game where each side drew a line trying to trap the other. Removing the opponent and adding food produced the single-player form that spread across many platforms. What turned it into a game the whole world knows was its inclusion as a built-in game on the 1997 Nokia 6110 phone. That it worked even on a small screen with very few buttons was the source of its staying power.

The snake moves on its own

The snake advances one cell at a fixed interval in whatever direction it's currently facing. Pressing an arrow key doesn't tell it to move; it tells it which way to move next. Since it keeps going even if you let go, doing nothing in this game is the same choice as going straight.

Eating food makes it longer

When the head enters the food's cell, the score goes up by one and the body gains a cell. To be precise, it only skips shortening the tail that one time. Normally, the head advances one cell while the tail retreats one cell at the same moment, keeping the length unchanged. New food then appears somewhere else on the board right away.

There are only two ways to end it

The run ends the moment you go off the board or the head hits your own body. There is no other danger. There is no time limit and no target score, so as long as you don't die, it continues indefinitely. That's why a Snake score is closer to a count of mistakes than a measure of skill.

From here on, this section covers what this specific app does. Every Snake implementation differs in board size, speed, and how walls are handled, so reading this once should save you from a few unfair deaths.

A fifteen-by-fifteen square board

The board is fifteen cells wide and fifteen tall, two hundred twenty-five cells total. At the start, the snake is placed in the center at length three, facing right. It stays still until it receives its first direction input, so feel free to look the board over before starting. Any arrow key or swipe is the signal to go.

Speed never changes

This is the biggest difference from other Snake games. This app advances one cell every 0.16 seconds, and that interval never changes no matter your score or body length. There's no speeding up as you eat, no level progression, and no speed setting. So the late game gets harder purely because the board gets tighter, not because your hands can't keep up. Since the room you build up early carries straight through to your final score, there's no reason to rush at the start.

You cannot pass through walls

This isn't the kind of board where going off the top edge brings you out the bottom. Going even one cell off the board ends the run immediately. This rule sets the value of edge-hugging tactics: a path that hugs the wall has nothing to bump into, which is safe, but it also removes one direction of escape.

A cell the tail just left is safe to step on

Whether you've hit your own body is checked against the body after the tail has already retreated. So moving the head into the cell the tail tip currently occupies is not death, since the tail vacates that cell at the same moment. The exception is a tick where you eat food; the tail doesn't retreat that time, so if food happens to sit right where the tail tip is, that cell becomes one you cannot step on.

Turning the opposite way, and its trap

If you're heading right and press left, that input is simply discarded. It's ignored rather than causing a collision, so there's nothing to worry about there. But turning twice before a single cell of movement is a different story. Heading right, pressing up and then left in quick succession: neither input is the direct opposite of the current direction, so both go through, and the snake turns straight into its own neck. Mashing arrow keys when you're in a hurry is how this happens.

Where food appears

Food is chosen from every cell the snake isn't currently occupying. There's no bias toward the center or away from the head. The random value used to choose is drawn from that day's date, so anyone who visits on the same day gets the same sequence. Because cells occupied by the snake are excluded from the candidates, though, exactly where food lands can still differ from player to player depending on how you've moved. That's enough to compete under the same conditions, but it does not guarantee an identical board.

Controls and missing features

The keyboard only accepts the four arrow keys; letter keys do nothing. With touch, swipe anywhere on the board, and a motion shorter than twenty pixels is treated as a tap and ignored. A diagonal swipe is resolved by whichever axis moved more.

We also state clearly what's missing. There is no pause, and there's no restart button, so once a run ends you have to refresh to play again. Progress is not saved, so closing the tab mid-run discards that run, and there's nowhere that records a high score. There's no undo and no extra lives either. Everything runs in your browser only, so no account is needed.

After it ends

When you die, the score appears on the spot along with a share button. Pressing it copies a short message carrying only the date and your score. It never includes your path or where food appeared, so sending it to someone who hasn't played yet never spoils anything.

These are things you do by eye and by hand; this app draws no path and marks no dangerous cell, so you have to judge everything yourself. Once learned, though, they carry over to any Snake game.

Look past the food to your next move

The gap between a beginner and an experienced player isn't whether they eat the food, it's where they go right after. Remember that entering a food cell adds one cell to your body, and count how many ways out exist from that spot before committing. Food with only one way out can cost you the entire run.

Turn early, and only once

A turn takes effect on the next cell of movement. Pressing it a couple of cells ahead of time is much safer than pressing it right before you'd collide. Rapid double-tapping invites the self-collision described above, so make a habit of confirming the snake has actually turned and moved one cell before pressing the next direction.

Circle with your back to the edge

Crossing through the center splits the board left and right, leaving the remaining space in two pieces. This causes no trouble while your body is short, but past about twenty cells, a single crossing like that can come back to bite you later. It's better to make big loops along the walls and only dip inward when you need to.

Because speed is constant, all of the late-game difficulty comes from managing space. The three techniques below are how you manage it.

Sweep in an S pattern

Set a fixed back-and-forth path, going all the way across one row, dropping one cell, and coming back, and move only along that path. It looks tedious, but because it passes through the entire board without gaps, food will eventually land inside your path no matter where it appears. With fifteen rows, a full loop isn't even that long. It's a good fallback when your body has grown long enough that planning gets overwhelming.

Never lose track of your tail

The simplest test for whether you're trapped is whether there's still a path from where you are to your own tail. Because the tail steps aside every moment, a path chasing the tail is rarely blocked. If the food looks far or risky, giving it up and buying time by following your tail is always an option. The fact that this game has no time limit is what makes that option valuable.

Don't split the open space

As your body grows, the snake itself becomes a wall dividing the board. If a move splits the remaining empty space into two chunks and your head ends up in the smaller one, there's no way out once your body is longer than that chunk's cell count. So in the late game, instead of the shortest path to food, choose the path that keeps the empty space as one connected chunk. This is also why hugging the wall is good: a body that runs along the edge only wraps the outside without ever cutting the board in two.

Dying without pressing anything

This is usually one of two things. Either you pressed a direction key twice before a single cell of movement and turned into your own neck, or you pressed another key while the previous press hadn't taken effect yet and ended up on a different cell than expected. Watching the snake actually turn after one press before pressing the next key clears up most of these.

Going off the board while grazing a wall

Hugging the edge is a good tactic, but your reaction time is effectively cut in half at corners. This board doesn't let you pass through walls, so turning late here is unrecoverable. Decide your turn two cells before you reach the wall and commit to it.

When food is stuck in a corner

Food against a corner practically has only one way in and one way out. If your body is short, just go for it, but once it's grown, clear some space around the corner and make an exit path before going in. Food never disappears, so there's no need to rush.

When a run ends abruptly

There's no restart button, so starting over means refreshing the page. There's no resume either, so a dead run is simply over. On the other hand, the food sequence starts from the same point throughout that day, so remembering where food appeared in the run you just lost makes the next one noticeably easier to start.