Snake Game
Steer the snake with arrow keys, WASD, or swipes, eat the food to grow, and try to beat your best score.
Snake
Press an arrow key, tap the board, or Start
Arrow keys or WASD to steer, P to pause. On a phone, swipe on the board.
How it works
- Press Start, tap the board, or hit any arrow key to begin a run.
- Steer with the arrow keys or WASD on a keyboard, or swipe in any direction on a touch screen; press P or the Pause button to take a break.
- Eat the dark squares to grow and score points — the run ends when the snake hits a wall or its own tail, and your best score is saved automatically.
Frequently asked questions
- What are the controls for this snake game?
- On a keyboard, use the arrow keys or WASD to change direction and P to pause or resume. On phones and tablets, swipe up, down, left, or right anywhere on the board to steer, and tap the board to start or resume a game.
- How does the snake game end?
- The run ends when the snake’s head hits one of the four walls or any part of its own tail. There is no way to pass through walls in this version, so longer snakes need wider turns — planning a path before you commit to a corner is most of the skill.
- Where is my best score stored, and is anything sent to a server?
- Your best score is kept in your browser’s local storage on your own device, and the game itself runs entirely in the page. Nothing is uploaded or tracked, so the score persists between visits on the same browser but will not follow you to another device.
- What do the slow, normal, and fast speed settings change?
- The setting controls how often the snake advances one grid cell: roughly six, eight, or twelve steps per second. Slow is comfortable for learning or playing on a small phone screen, while fast is closer to the pace of classic handheld versions and rewards quick reactions.
- Why does the game feel smooth even on a slow device?
- The game separates logic from rendering: snake movement runs on a fixed time step, so the speed is identical on every device, while drawing happens on animation frames scaled to your screen’s pixel density. If a frame is dropped, the snake simply catches up on the next one instead of speeding up or slowing down.
About this tool
This is the classic snake game, playable free in your browser with no download, plugin, or account. You steer a snake around a 20 by 20 grid, eating food squares that make the tail one segment longer and add a point to your score. The run ends the moment the head touches a wall or any part of the tail, so every extra point makes the next one harder to earn — the simple rule set that has kept snake popular since the earliest mobile phones.
Everything runs locally on your device. The board is drawn on an HTML canvas scaled to your screen’s pixel density, so the grid stays crisp on high-resolution phone displays, and the game logic advances on a fixed time step so the snake moves at exactly the same speed regardless of frame rate. Your best score is written to the browser’s local storage and nothing ever leaves your device — there is no server, no account, and no tracking of your play.
The game works equally well with a keyboard or a touch screen. On a desktop, the arrow keys or WASD steer and P pauses; on a phone, swipe in any direction on the board to turn and tap it to start. Reverse inputs are ignored, so an accidental press toward your own tail never ends a run instantly. Three speed settings let you pick the pace: slow for learning or casual play, normal for the standard experience, and fast for a genuine reflex challenge.
A practical tip for higher scores: keep the snake in long, orderly sweeps along one wall instead of chasing each food square directly. Leaving one open column as a corridor back to the other side prevents the most common cause of death — boxing yourself in with your own tail. When a run goes wrong, the score and best-score panel make it easy to see whether the attempt was still progress.