Snake is possibly the most widely played video game ever made, which is remarkable for something you can describe in one sentence: move around a grid, eat things, get longer, do not hit anything.
It is also one of the least explained. Nearly everyone learned it by picking up a phone in 1999 and pressing buttons, and most people never got past the point where their own tail became the problem. This guide covers the whole thing, from what the grid actually is up to the strategies that separate a score of 40 from a score of 150.
The rules
There are three, and that is genuinely all of them.
- Your snake moves continuously in the direction it is facing. It never stops, and you cannot pause it by not pressing anything.
- Eating food makes you one segment longer and adds to your score. New food appears somewhere else immediately.
- Hitting a wall or any part of your own body ends the game.
That is the entire ruleset. Everything difficult about Snake emerges from those three lines rather than from anything added on top, which is why the game has survived fifty years of hardware changes without needing a redesign.
The grid
Snake is played on a grid of cells, not on a smooth surface. Your snake occupies a whole number of cells and moves exactly one cell per tick. This matters more than it seems: it means every position in the game is discrete and countable, which is what makes the advanced strategies possible at all.
A standard board is 20 by 20, giving 400 cells. Your snake starts at length three or so, and the theoretical maximum is a snake of 400 that fills the board completely.
Controls
Keyboard
| Key | Direction |
|---|---|
| Arrow keys | Up, down, left, right |
| W A S D | The same, for players who prefer their left hand on the keys |
Touch
Swipe in the direction you want to turn. Two details make a large difference on a phone, and both are counterintuitive:
- Keep swipes short. A long swipe registers later than a short one, because the browser waits to see where the gesture is going.
- Start swipes from the middle of the screen. A swipe that begins near the left or right edge is frequently intercepted by the browser's own back-navigation gesture and never reaches the game at all.
Why you cannot reverse
Pressing the direction opposite to your current heading does nothing. This is not a bug, it is the only sensible behaviour: reversing would immediately drive your head into the segment directly behind it, which is your own neck, ending the game instantly.
Your first games
For the first twenty or so points, Snake plays itself. Your body is short, the board is empty, and heading straight for the food works every time. Enjoy this, because it is about to stop working.
Turn earlier than feels right
The single most useful beginner habit. Because movement is grid-based and continuous, a turn you input while your head is already level with the obstacle is a turn that happens one cell too late. Give yourself a cell of margin on every turn and a large share of your early deaths disappear.
Do not chase food into corners
Food that appears in a corner is a trap disguised as points. You have to enter a space with two walls and only one exit, and if your body is anywhere near, that exit closes. Leave corner food until your route passes it naturally.
Why everyone dies at about 40
There is a length at which almost every player dies, and it is not a coincidence. It is the point where heading straight for the food stops being a strategy and becomes a way of building a maze around yourself.
What is actually happening
Every time you take the shortest path to a piece of food, you carve your body across the board in whatever shape that path happened to be. Do that fifteen times and the free space is no longer one connected region. It is two or three pockets joined by corridors one cell wide.
Then you enter a pocket smaller than your own body, and there is no move that saves you. The fatal decision was made several seconds earlier, which is exactly why Snake feels unfair right up until this clicks.
Play Snake and watch for it
The classic, plus a multiplayer arena. Free, no download.
The four habits that get you past it
1. Sweep in rows
Stop steering toward food. Sweep the board systematically instead: across, down one row, back the other way. The pattern has a name, boustrophedon, from the way an ox ploughs a field.
It is slow, and it will roughly double your best score the first time you use it properly. A sweep never fragments the free space, because your body always forms one continuous wall behind you rather than a maze, and you collect every piece of food eventually because your route covers every cell.
2. Hug the edges early
Body length against a wall blocks passage on one side only. Body length in open space blocks it on two, and splits the region in half. So in the first half of a run, when you have a choice of routes to the same food, take the one along a wall. You end up coiled around the perimeter with a large, clean, connected space in the middle, which is exactly the shape you want when things get tight.
3. Count before you commit
Before entering any enclosed area, ask one question: is the number of free cells in there bigger than my current length? If it is not, you cannot get out, however well you steer. You do not need to count precisely under time pressure. A rough sense of 'that gap is about as long as I am' is enough.
4. Follow your own tail
The most useful escape technique in the game. When you have no good move, follow your own tail. The cell your tail currently occupies is guaranteed to be free by the time you reach it, because the tail moves forward as you do, provided you do not eat anything.
Chasing your tail buys unlimited time. It scores nothing, and it will save runs that are otherwise lost.
Scoring, speed and food
How scoring works
One point per piece of food in the classic rules, and your length increases by one segment at the same time. Score and length are therefore the same number, which is unusual and rather elegant: your score is literally the size of the obstacle you have to avoid. There is no way to gain points without also making the game harder.
Does the game speed up?
In the original design, no. There is no scripted speed increase, no levels and no difficulty curve written by anybody. The game gets harder purely because your own body fills more of the board.
That is worth appreciating, because it is why Snake ages so well. A difficulty curve designed in 1997 would feel wrong today. A difficulty curve generated by the player's own success is correctly calibrated for every player automatically, forever. A beginner faces an easy board because their snake is short, and an expert faces a nearly impossible one for exactly the same reason.
Where food appears
Somewhere random that is not currently occupied by your body. This has one important consequence: late in a run, when your snake fills much of the board, food will sometimes appear in a place that is genuinely awkward or briefly unreachable.
Do not treat that as a problem to solve immediately. Follow your tail, keep the free space connected, and wait. Either the food becomes reachable as your tail clears space, or you survive long enough that it does not matter. Forcing a route to awkward food is one of the most common ways good runs end.
What a good score looks like
| Score | What it means |
|---|---|
| Under 30 | Still learning the controls and the turn timing. |
| 30 to 50 | Where greedy play tops out. Most players stall here permanently. |
| 50 to 100 | You are thinking about the shape of the free space, not just the next apple. |
| 100 to 150 | Sweeping deliberately and managing the board on every move. |
| 150 and above | The game has quietly become a puzzle you are solving in real time. |
The full breakdown of the sweep pattern, safe-cell counting and arena tactics is in the Snake strategy guide. If you would rather know where the game came from, it predates Nokia by two decades and the history is genuinely strange.
Multiplayer Snake
In a shared arena, every other player's body is also a wall, and unlike your own body it is being placed by someone actively trying to cut you off. Three things change.
- Perimeter play gets stronger, not weaker. Along a wall you can only be cut off from one side.
- Length becomes a liability sooner. In single-player a long snake is a score. In an arena it is a large target that struggles to turn.
- The winning move is often to do nothing. Let two aggressive players cut each other off, then take the space they vacated.
The habit that transfers worst from single-player is chasing food. In an arena the food is bait, and the player racing you to it is usually the one who dies, because you have both committed to a fixed path in front of a third player. Play Snake online free to see how differently it plays.