Snake Game Tips: Grow Longer, Live Longer

How the game works here

The garden is a grid of twenty by twenty squares. The snake starts four squares long, heading right, and grows by one square for every red apple, which also scores 10 points. After every fifth apple a golden apple appears for seven seconds and is worth 50 points and two extra squares. The snake speeds up a little with every apple until it reaches its top speed.

Your scores, personal bests and a table of your ten best games for each mode are kept in your browser on this device.

Steering without panic

On a computer, the arrow keys or W, A, S and D turn the snake. On a phone, swipe on the garden in the direction you want, tap beside the snake's head (to its left or right when it is moving up or down, above or below it when it moves across), or use the arrow buttons under the game. The snake never turns straight back into its own neck; to reverse, turn twice, for example up and then left.

The page remembers up to two turns ahead, so a quick double press makes a tight U-turn into the next lane. That one move is worth practising until it is automatic, because a long snake survives on U-turns.

The early game: eat fast, stay tidy

While the snake is short, nothing can trap you, so take the shortest path to each apple. The habit to build now is tidiness: approach apples along the edges rather than cutting through the middle, and finish each move with the snake lying in a straight line. A straight snake is easy to steer around; a snake coiled in the middle of the garden splits the space into pockets.

The middle game: keep the middle open

Once the snake is about a third of the garden long, the danger changes. Apples now appear in pockets the snake has half closed off, and the classic way to die is to dive into one and find no way out.

• Hug the walls. Travel along the edges and the space in the middle stays in one piece.
• Sweep in lanes. Moving back and forth in parallel lanes, like mowing a lawn, keeps the body in neat rows and always leaves the next lane free.
• Count before you dive. Before you go into a narrow gap for an apple, ask whether the tail will have moved out of the way by the time you need to come back out.

Golden apples: worth the risk?

A golden apple is worth five red ones, but it vanishes after seven seconds and blinks for its last two. Go for it when it is on your side of the garden or along a wall you were going to follow anyway. Ignore it when reaching it means cutting across a crowded middle; fifty points are not worth the whole game. Remember that a golden apple also makes the snake two squares longer, which matters late in a game.

The daily rocks and the No walls mode

In the daily challenge, a handful of rocks are scattered across the garden, the same for everyone that day. They never touch each other, so no square is ever sealed off, but they make the edges less safe and the middle more cramped. Plan your lanes so they run beside the rocks rather than towards them.

In No walls the edges are doors: leave on the right and you come back on the left. Use them as shortcuts to apples on the far side, but keep in mind that your own body also continues through the edge, so the square just past a wall may already be snake.

Scores and records

Every game ends with your score, apples and length, and a new personal best gets a short celebration. The High scores box under the game lists your ten best games in the current mode with their dates. Snake runs entirely in your browser, so nothing is sent to our server and scores are not part of the daily leaderboards.