Snake
Eat, grow, and never bite your own tail. Made by Patrick Gillespie.
Arrow keys or WASD to steer. Follow the on screen prompt to start a game.
How to play
- Steer the snake toward the food that appears on the board.
- Each piece of food adds a segment to your tail and a point to your score.
- The snake never stops moving, so plan turns a step ahead.
- Hitting a wall or your own body ends the run.
Playing it better
- Hug the outer edge early and keep the middle of the board free for later.
- Turn in wide loops rather than tight corners once your tail passes twenty segments.
- When food appears in a corner, approach along the wall so you always keep an exit.
- Slow your inputs down. Most deaths come from double tapping a direction, not from bad routes.
About Snake
Snake is the game that taught a generation what a high score feels like, and this browser version by Patrick Gillespie has been running and being maintained for well over a decade. The rules fit in one sentence: move, eat, grow, and do not run into yourself. What makes it stick is that the game punishes you with the exact thing it rewards you for, because every point you score makes the board smaller and the next point harder to reach.
The strategy is mostly space management. Beginners chase food in straight lines and trap themselves inside a coil of their own tail somewhere around forty points. Stronger players treat the board as a set of rooms and always leave a corridor back to open space, which costs a couple of seconds per apple and makes very long runs possible.
A habit worth building early is travelling in ordered sweeps, moving up and down the columns of the board in sequence so your tail lays itself out in predictable lines instead of tangled knots. It feels slow at first. It is also the difference between a fifty point run and a two hundred point one, because a tidy tail leaves you options when the board fills up.
This version keeps a local high score, adjusts its speed as you grow and runs on plain JavaScript with no dependencies, which is why it loads instantly and works the same on a laptop or a tablet. The source is MIT licensed and readable, and it is a common starting point for people learning how a game loop actually works.
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Common questions
Who wrote this version of Snake?+
Patrick Gillespie. It is open source under the MIT licence and the repository is linked on this page.
How do I start a game?+
Use the on screen prompt or press an arrow key, then steer with the arrow keys or WASD.
Does the snake get faster?+
Yes, the pace increases as you grow, which is what eventually ends most runs.
Is my high score saved?+
It is kept in your own browser, so it survives a reload but never leaves your device.
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