🐍 Snake

How to play Snake.

Steer the snake around the board with the arrow keys, the WASD keys or — on a phone — the on-screen pad. Each piece of food the snake eats makes it one segment longer and adds to your score. The catch is that the snake never stops moving and never shrinks: run into a wall or into the snake's own tail and the game is over. The longer you survive, the longer and more dangerous your own body becomes.

Snake is one of the oldest video game ideas still played today. It traces back to the 1976 arcade game Blockade, but most people met it on Nokia mobile phones in the late 1990s, where it came pre-installed and quietly became one of the most widely played games ever made.

The winning instinct is to stay tidy. Run the snake along the edges and keep the centre of the board open for as long as you can. Before the snake gets long, decide on a route — many strong players follow a steady back-and-forth pattern that covers every square without crossing their own path. Above all, never make a turn that boxes you into a space too small to escape. Difficulty changes the snake's speed, so start on Normal and work up.