How to Play Snake

Keyboard Controls

On desktop, the snake is steered with either the arrow keys or the WASD keys, and both work identically at the same time, so you can switch between them mid-game without any penalty.

• Up Arrow or W: turn the snake upward
• Down Arrow or S: turn the snake downward
• Left Arrow or A: turn the snake left
• Right Arrow or D: turn the snake right
• Spacebar: pause or resume the current run

Touch and Mobile Controls

On a phone or tablet, two separate input methods are available and you can freely mix them within the same run.

• On-screen direction pad: a small cross of four arrow buttons below the board. Tap the direction you want to turn.
• Swipe on the board: swipe up, down, left, or right anywhere on the playing field itself to turn in that direction, without needing to look away from the snake to find a button.
• Pause button: a dedicated Pause control sits above the board next to the score, so pausing does not require the spacebar on touch devices.

Understanding the Game Board

The board is a square grid. Every position the snake or the food can occupy is exactly one grid cell, and the snake moves exactly one cell per tick (the interval between moves, controlled by your difficulty setting). This is why Snake, unlike a game with free-form pixel movement, is really a planning puzzle: your options at any moment are always exactly one of four directions, never a partial turn or a diagonal.

As your snake grows, the amount of open, safe space on the board shrinks correspondingly, which is the entire source of Snake's difficulty curve. A snake three squares long has almost nowhere it can go wrong; a snake sixty squares long has to actively manage the shape of its own body to avoid trapping itself, which is exactly the skill our strategy guide focuses on.

The Core Gameplay Loop

Every run of Snake follows the same repeating sequence from start to finish.

1. The snake starts as three connected squares near the centre of the board, already moving in one direction.
2. A single piece of food appears at a random empty square somewhere on the grid.
3. You steer the snake's head toward the food using any of the controls above.
4. When the head reaches the food's square, the snake grows by one square and a new piece of food appears elsewhere on the board.
5. This repeats, with the snake getting one square longer every time, until the run ends.

Scoring

Each piece of food eaten is worth exactly 10 points. There is no time bonus, no combo multiplier, and no penalty for taking a slow, careful route to the food rather than a direct one. Your live score is shown at the top of the game next to "Score:", and it updates the instant a piece of food is eaten. Your personal best across all previous runs on this device is shown next to "Best:", and it updates automatically the moment a new run beats it.

What Ends a Run

A run ends immediately, with no warning and no way to recover, the instant either of the following happens:

• Wall collision (Classic mode only): the snake's head moves onto or past the outer edge of the board.
• Self-collision (both modes): the snake's head moves onto any square currently occupied by its own body, including the segment directly behind the head if you attempt an immediate 180-degree reversal.

Direction Queueing and Why 180-Degree Turns Don't Work

You cannot turn a snake directly backward into itself: if the snake is moving right, pressing left is ignored rather than applied, because that would mean immediately colliding with the segment directly behind the head. This is not a bug, it is the same rule every version of Snake has used since the original, and it exists because a literal instant reversal has no meaningful gameplay use, since the snake's own body is always right there.

Turns you make are applied on the next tick, not instantly, which matters most at higher difficulty levels where ticks happen quickly. If you press two different direction keys in the small window between two ticks, only the most recent one is used for the next move. Pressing keys rapidly and repeatedly, rather than making one deliberate turn at a time, is one of the most common reasons new players lose a run they otherwise had full control over.

Difficulty and Wall Mode

Both settings live in the settings panel (the gear icon in the top bar) and can be changed before a run starts or in the middle of one. See our dedicated modes and difficulty page for a full breakdown of what each option changes.

• Difficulty (Easy, Normal, Hard): controls how quickly the snake moves. Changing it mid-run takes effect on your very next move.
• Board mode (Classic walls or No Walls): Classic ends the run on wall contact. No Walls makes the snake reappear on the opposite edge instead, turning the board into a wrap-around space.

Pausing and Resuming

Press Spacebar or tap the Pause button at any point during an active run to freeze the game exactly where it stands. Nothing moves, no input is processed, and the run resumes from the exact same position and score when you press Pause (now showing Resume) again. Pausing is available at any difficulty and at any point after your first move.