Snake Game — Play Classic Snake Online

Most browser versions of Snake lose your input when you turn twice in a hurry. You tap up and then left inside one frame, the second key overwrites the first, and the snake drives into its own neck. This Snake Game queues up to two turns between moves, so a quick U-turn around an apple lands the way your fingers meant it.

The board is 20 × 20, which is 400 cells. The snake starts three cells long, heading right, with the first apple five squares ahead. Every apple adds one point and one segment. Fill the whole board and the game ends with “You filled the whole board!” rather than a crash.

The Controls on Keyboard and Touch

• Arrow keys or W A S D steer. Pressing an arrow on the start screen begins the run in that direction.
• Space or P pauses and resumes; Enter starts a new game after a crash.
• On a phone, swipe on the board to turn, or use the arrow pad underneath. A short tap on the board pauses.
• Edges picks Walls, where leaving the board ends the run, or Wrap around, where the snake reappears on the opposite side.
• Speed sets 150, 110 or 75 ms per move. With Speed up as you eat on, every fifth apple takes 5 ms off, down to a floor of 55 ms, about 18 moves a second.

What Happens When Two Turns Come Fast

Turns wait in a queue of two. A third press before the next move is dropped, and a turn straight back into the body is ignored instead of ending the game. The snake may also move into the cell its tail is leaving on the same tick, because the tail moves first; plenty of versions count that as a crash.

A wall hit ends with “Game over — you hit the wall.”, and running into yourself gives a different message, so you know which mistake to fix.

Speed Limits and Saved Scores

The game pauses itself when you switch tabs, so a notification never costs you a long run. Settings lock while a game is under way. Your best score is kept on this device for each combination of edge mode, speed and speed-up, which is twelve tables in all. A Fast, Walls record is never compared with a Slow, Wrap one.

Arrow keys only start steering once the board has focus or a game is running. Until then they scroll the page as usual.