Snake

How to play Snake

1. Pick a mode. Classic and Wraparound are endless, Gardens has seed targets and stars, and the Daily garden changes every day.
2. Press an arrow key, swipe or tap the touch pad to start. The snake waits on the ready screen until you do.
3. Steer toward the seed without entering walls, stone beds, shut gates or the snake’s own body.
4. Reach seeds soon after they appear to build a streak multiplier up to X4.
5. Chase the beetle that wakes after every fourth seed before its countdown bar runs out.
6. In Gardens, eat the target number of seeds to clear the board, then replay it for any missing stars.

Controls

About Snake

Snake brings a familiar small-screen challenge to the browser: eat a seed, grow one square and keep moving. Every successful bite changes the board, because the space you just crossed is now filled by your own tail. The rules take seconds to learn. The routing gets deeper as the snake grows, and a calm, orderly path matters more than quick reactions once the body fills a third of the screen. A run ends when the head meets a wall, a stone bed, a shut gate or any part of the body.

Classic uses a twenty-column, eighteen-row board with solid edges. Wraparound joins opposite edges, so leaving the right side brings you back on the left; it never protects you from the body waiting on the far side. Both modes offer four paces, from Relaxed to Blazing, and one, three or five seeds on the board at a time. Faster paces pay more for every seed, so a single best score per mode stays fair whichever pace you prefer.

Gardens is a campaign of twenty-four authored boards in three worlds. Stone Beds introduces fixed obstacles. Burrows adds paired holes: enter one and the snake pops out of its twin, still heading the same way. Some Burrows fences also have gaps that wrap a single row or column. Gatehouse adds timed gates that blink for four moves before they shut, and a gate never closes while any part of the snake is inside it. Seed targets rise from eight to nineteen, and every garden starts with a short snake.

Each garden awards up to three stars: one for reaching the seed target, one for catching at least one beetle, and one for finishing within the move par shown before you start. Par values come from many simulated runs along direct routes, so a tidy path earns the third star without perfect play. Stars also unlock four extra screen tints for every mode: Amber, Frost, Night and Pocket.

Quick bites build a streak. When a seed appears, the game measures the shortest route to it and allows six extra moves. Arrive inside that window and the multiplier climbs, up to X4; take the long way and it resets. Every fourth seed wakes a beetle somewhere nearby, and a countdown bar at the bottom of the screen shows how long it will wait. Catching it scores bonus points based on the time left, and it never makes the snake longer.

The Daily garden builds one symmetric board for each calendar day from the date itself, so everyone who plays that day meets the same stones, the same optional burrow pair and the same opening seed. It uses the standard pace and a single seed. The game keeps your best score for the day, how many times you played and a streak of consecutive days.

The screen uses four muted tones with a faint pixel shadow, a dotted grid and a brief ghost as the tail moves on, like an old liquid-crystal display. The head looks where it is going, opens its mouth near food and flicks a tongue, and swallowed seeds travel down the body as small bulges. Movement stays in whole squares, which keeps every turn readable. Sound is optional and generated in the browser. A reduced-motion setting removes the shake, blinking and particles.

Progress saves in this browser when local storage is available: best scores for every mode, stars for each garden, the daily record, lifetime statistics and your options. Records from the first version of this game carry over, including cleared gardens. Nothing is uploaded, and there is no account or online leaderboard. Pausing, switching tabs or rotating a phone stops the snake, and it waits for fresh input before moving again.

A few useful tricks

• Leave a corridor beside your tail instead of filling the middle of the board first.
• Watch the short bar under the streak counter. It shows how much of the quick-bite window is left.
• A beetle never makes you longer, so a short detour is worth it when the path is clear.
• In Burrows, check the far side before diving in. You leave the twin hole moving in the same direction.
• Gates blink for four moves before they shut. If you are already inside, the gate waits for you.
• In Wraparound, look at the opposite edge before using it as an escape route.

Good questions