Snake
NEWWorks on both desktop and mobile. Tap or click to play.
About This Game
Play the classic Snake game free online. Eat, grow, and chase your high score. Arrow keys on desktop, swipe or D-pad on mobile. No downloads, no sign-up.
How to play Snake
Objective: Eat as much food as you can to grow the longest snake and beat the Best score saved in your browser, since the only ending is a crash you cause.
You steer a snake on a 20 by 20 grid. It starts three segments long at the center, already moving right. The red dot is food. Guide the cyan head onto it and the snake grows by one segment while your Score rises by one, then a new dot appears on a random empty cell. There is no timer and no lives: play continues until the head hits a wall or its own body.
Turn with arrow keys, W A S D, the on-screen D-pad, or a swipe on the board that travels more than 20 pixels. You cannot reverse straight back into yourself, so while moving right a left press is ignored. Plan turns as two ninety-degree steps. The four walls are solid, not wraparound, so crossing any edge ends the run instantly.
Speed is the twist. Each food cuts the step time by 4 milliseconds, from a starting 160 down to a floor of 70, which you reach at about 23 food eaten. From there the snake stays at top speed and never slows. Press Space or the center D-pad button to pause and resume. On Game Over, Play Again resets the snake to three segments and the speed to 160.
Tips and strategy
Turn in two steps
Because a direct reverse is blocked, you cannot escape a wall you are racing toward by flipping around. To double back, turn ninety degrees, travel one cell, then turn again. Give yourself that room before you are pinned against an edge.
Bank the tail gap
When you are not eating, the head can enter the exact cell your tail just left. Use this to hug your own body in a tight loop that looks like a crash but is legal, unless food is there to freeze the tail in place.
Carve edges early
While the snake is short and slow, sweep along the outer rows and columns in a back-and-forth pattern. Filling the perimeter first keeps the interior as one clean block, so later food stays reachable without threading between your own coils.
Respect the 70ms floor
Around 23 food eaten the step time bottoms out and never eases. Treat that score as the point where reaction time, not planning, decides the run. Keep the body in loose parallel lanes so every turn has a safe exit.
The history of Snake
Snake descends from Blockade, a 1976 Gremlin arcade game, and spread through decades of home-computer clones. Its most famous form came when Nokia loaded a version onto its mobile phones in the late 1990s. Preinstalled on tens of millions of handsets, it became one of the most widely played games ever. This version keeps that skeleton and adds a rising speed, so the challenge shifts from planning to reflexes as your Score climbs.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a way to win?
There is no victory screen. The only ceiling is filling all 400 cells of the grid, which almost never happens. In everyday play, winning means topping the Best score shown next to your Score, since that number is what the game keeps between runs.
Does the snake wrap around the edges?
No. All four walls are lethal. The moment the head would cross the top, bottom, left, or right boundary, the game ends. Unlike Snake versions that let you slide off one side and reappear on the other, this build treats every edge as a hard stop.
Why did I survive touching my own tail?
When the snake is not eating, the tail vacates its cell on the same tick the head moves, so the head may legally enter that square. You only crash into a segment that stays put, which includes the whole body on the tick you eat food.
Is my high score saved, and can I play on a phone?
Your best score is stored in your browser and reloads next visit, but only on that device, so clearing site data resets it. On mobile, swipe more than 20 pixels to steer, or use the on-screen D-pad, whose center button pauses and resumes like the Space key.