Snake — the classic grid game, running entirely on your device

How to play Snake

1. Press Start game (or hit Space). The snake begins moving to the right on its own — you do not drive it forwards, you only choose which way it turns.
2. Steer the head into the food pellet. Each pellet makes the snake one segment longer and adds to your score.
3. Keep away from the walls and from your own body. Hitting either ends the run immediately.
4. The snake speeds up as it grows, so the safe area shrinks at exactly the moment your tail gets harder to avoid. That tension is the whole game.
5. When you crash, your score is compared with your personal best and saved if it is higher. Press Restart or R to go again.

Game rules

The board is a 20 × 20 grid, 400 squares in total. The snake starts three segments long. Every pellet eaten adds one segment and one point. The game ends when the head moves into a wall or into any segment of the body — including the one immediately behind the neck, which is why a 180-degree turn is not allowed: the snake can never reverse into itself.

Speed is divided into eight levels. Every fourth pellet moves the snake up a level, shortening the delay between moves from 130 ms down to 70 ms. Nothing else changes: no obstacles appear, no pellets expire, and there is no time limit.

Tips for a higher score

• Leave yourself an escape route. Before you steer towards a pellet, check that the square you are heading into is not a dead end. Most runs end not because of a mistake but because of a corridor with no exit.
• Hug the walls. Early on, the centre of the board is the most dangerous place, because your body can approach you from four directions. Along an edge it can only come from three.
• Plan the tail, not the head. Your tail is moving too. A gap that looks safe now may be filled by the time you reach it — and, more usefully, a gap that is blocked now may open up as the tail slides away.
• Do not chase the shortest path. Taking one extra square to approach a pellet from a safer side is almost always worth more than the time it costs.
• Think in rectangles. A common high-score pattern is to circle the perimeter and spiral slowly inward, keeping the body in tidy rows instead of a knot.
• Slow down before the last levels. At speed 7 and 8, the delay between moves is under 90 ms — decide your next two turns in advance rather than reacting to each frame.

Why this version runs 100% locally

There is no server playing the game with you. The board is drawn on an HTML canvas by JavaScript running in your tab, the snake's position is a list of coordinates in memory, and your best score is written to your browser's local storage on your own device. Nothing about your game — not the score, not the timing, not how long you played — is transmitted anywhere, because the page contains no code that could send it.

That is the same guarantee the tools on this site make about your files, and it is easy to verify: load this page, wait for it to finish, then switch your device to aeroplane mode. The game keeps running. Advertising on the site is served by Google AdSense in separate ad frames, which never see anything that happens inside the board — and rejecting advertising cookies in the cookie notice does not affect the game at all.

Frequently asked questions

Yes — no payment, no premium mode, no "watch an ad to continue". Restarting costs nothing.

Yes. Swipe on the board to turn; the layout shrinks to fit the screen. There is nothing to install.

In your browser's local storage for this site only. Clearing site data or browsing in a private window resets it to zero, and there is no copy on any server.

Click once on the board or press Start game so the game has focus, then use the arrow keys. On a keyboard, W A S D works too and does not scroll.

Yes — press Space or the Pause button. The timer stops and the board freezes until you resume.

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