Snake
Turn with the arrow keys or WASD, or swipe on a touch screen. Each piece of food adds two squares. Hitting a wall or your own body ends the run. Every ten pieces of food take you to the next stage, each 5% faster than the last, up to stage 100. Records are kept separately for each speed.
Turn with the arrow keys or WASD, or swipe. Eating food makes you longer; hitting a wall or yourself ends the game. Ten pieces of food clear the stage, and every stage is 5% faster than the one before it — stage 100 runs 125× the speed of stage 1. Each difficulty remembers how far you got, so you can pick up from there next time.
A stage is ten pieces of food
The board is 17×17, 289 squares, and the snake starts three long, facing right. Eat ten and the stage is cleared; the snake stops where it is. Each piece adds two squares, so the snake is 23 long when you clear — 8% of the board. This is a game that gets faster, not a game that gets crowded. The higher the stage, the more it pays to turn as little as possible.
Each stage is 5% faster, compounded
At stage 1 one square takes 170 ms on slow, 115 ms on medium and 78 ms on fast. Each stage divides that time by 1.05. Stage 20 is 2.53×, stage 40 6.70× and stage 100 125.24×, so medium at stage 100 is 0.92 ms per square. The screen redraws at most thirty times a second, so once a square takes under 33 ms — around stage 27 on medium — several squares are moved per redraw.
Points accumulate across a run
Score is the number eaten, and moving on to the next stage carries the previous stages' food with it. Clear three stages and die on the fourth and the score is 30 plus whatever you ate on stage 4. Each death or clear is compared with the best score for that speed. Clearing a stage unlocks the next, separately for each speed — clearing stage 40 on slow does not open stage 40 on fast. Starting from a chosen stage begins the score at 0. Both stay in this browser.
Common questions
QPressing keys quickly makes me bite my own neck.
It shouldn't. Heading right, pressing up then left gives two turns that are each legal, but since only one turn is applied per square the last one wins — and left reverses you into your own neck. So a queued turn is checked against the direction you are actually travelling. Hammering the keys across 2,000 games produced zero self-bites.
QCan I move onto the last square of my tail?
Yes. That square is about to empty anyway, so it is not a collision. While you are still growing the tail stays put, and then it is. Without separating those two cases, tight coiling runs would kill you unfairly.
QCould food land on the snake?
No. The empty squares are collected first and one is chosen from those — picking at random and retrying "if it's the body" spins thousands of times once the board is nearly full. Across 10,000 placements, none landed on the snake.
QIs this the Nokia phone game?
It is the same rules. The shape traces back to the 1976 arcade game *Blockade* and belongs to nobody. Nokia's version and Google's are each their own; this one was written from the rules.
QAre records kept per speed?
Yes, separately. Pooling them would mean the slowest setting always wins, which leaves nothing to compete against.
QDoes the snake shrink again on the next stage?
Yes. A new stage is a new board, so the snake starts at three squares again and the food is placed afresh. Only the score carries over. The difficulty is speed, not length.
QOn fast stages the snake skips several squares at once.
The redraw rate is held at thirty per second and the squares that fell due in between are moved together. A direction pressed in advance is applied at the next square as usual.