Snake — Play Free Online

Classic

A minimalist black-and-white Snake on a 20 by 20 grid: steer with the arrow keys, eat food for 10 points each, and avoid the walls and your own tail.

This Snake is a stripped-down take on the old phone game, written in the functional language PureScript and drawn on a plain black-and-white canvas. There are no menus, levels or power-ups. You get a square board, a black snake three blocks long, one black food square, and a score counter under the board. That is the whole game, and it is a good way to practise the basic skill Snake has always been about: planning your path several moves ahead.

How to play

Press Space (any key works) to start. The snake then sets off upward, one block at a time.
Use the arrow keys to turn it left, right, up or down. The snake keeps going in the last direction you chose.
Pressing the direction opposite to the one you are travelling in is ignored, so you cannot fold the snake back onto itself by accident.
Each food square you eat adds 10 points and makes the snake one block longer. A new food square then appears at a random spot.

The game is keyboard only, so it needs a computer rather than a phone or tablet.

How a run ends

The board is a grid of 20 by 20 squares with a solid border. Running into the edge or into any part of your own body ends the game straight away, and the food square starts to pulse to show the run is over. There is no restart button, so reload the page to play again.

Details worth knowing

The pace never changes. The snake moves one square roughly every 150 milliseconds from the first move to the last, so the challenge grows only because your body gets longer.
The score is shown with three digits, from 000 upward.
Food is placed at a random square without checking where your body is, so now and then it can land under the snake.

Tips

Stay away from the border early on. With a short snake, the walls are the main danger.
Once the snake is long, move in wide back-and-forth sweeps across the board instead of chasing the food directly. This keeps open space in front of the head.
Press each turn just before you need it. Because one key press equals one turn on the next step, tapping two keys too quickly can put you somewhere you did not plan.
Before turning towards food near your tail, check that the gap will still be open after your body moves up behind you.