No walls.
Two snakes.
Everyone has played snake alone on a phone. Almost nobody has played the version it started as: two snakes sharing one arena, where the edges are seams you pass straight through and the only thing that can kill you is a body — your own, or the one being driven by the person you are talking to. It is a thirty-second duel and it is the best possible thing to be doing while you talk.
Play it now ▸ — solo against the machine for the highscore board, or 1 on 1 with somebody on the network.
A snake duel on one wrapping arena, where the edges are seams you pass through and the only thing that kills you is a body — yours or theirs. The only real-time board here whose highscores are replayed and checked rather than taken on trust.
Where the arena came from
Snake is older than the phone it is famous on. It began as Blockade, a Gremlin arcade cabinet from 1976, and Blockade was a two-player game from the first day — two players, one board, each leaving a solid trail behind them, and the loser is whoever runs into something first. The single-player version everybody knows came afterwards, when home computers had one joystick and the apple was invented to give a lone player something to do.
What put it in front of hundreds of millions of people was Nokia, which shipped a snake written by Taneli Armanto on the 6110 in 1997 and on nearly every handset it sold for a decade after. That is the version most people are remembering, and it is the reason snake needs no explaining to anyone: it is probably the most widely played video game ever made, and almost none of that play was against another person.
This board goes back to Blockade. Playing alone is still here and still scores, but the arena is built for two, the starts are exact 180° rotations of each other so neither side opens with more room, and the thing that kills you most often is the other player.
How a duel works
- You move constantly and you cannot stop. Arrow keys or WASD turn you a quarter; on a phone, swipe the arena. You can never turn back into your own neck.
- Eat an apple and you grow three cells and get faster. Apples are worth more the further in you are — the first is worth 10 and the twentieth is worth 48 — so a long run is worth far more than twice a short one.
- The arena wraps and has no walls. Leave by the right edge and you come back at the same row on the left; leave by the top and you come back at the bottom. So you die on your own body and on the other snake, and on nothing else — and if you both go for the same cell, you both die and nobody wins it.
- Two apples are on the arena at once, which is deliberate. One would make a duel a pure footrace — whoever is closer eats, grows, gets faster and is closer to the next one too — and three would put one within a second of anywhere.
- A solo run scores on the highscore board whether you played the arena alone or against a machine. A duel against another person counts toward your record instead, like every other board here.
What a good player is doing
Not chasing the apple. That is the whole of it, and it is the thing that separates a run of two hundred points from a run of two thousand. A snake that goes straight at every apple is spending its length writing walls across the middle of the arena, and it will seal itself into a pocket somewhere around its twentieth. A good player takes the apple on the way to somewhere, and the somewhere is chosen so that the arena behind them stays connected.
Follow your own tail. Your tail is not a wall — it moves out of the way one cell ahead of you, every time you move, unless you have just eaten. So the safest place on a crowded arena is directly behind yourself, and a snake that has boxed itself in can very often survive indefinitely by circling its own body until an apple appears somewhere reachable. Learning to trust that is the single biggest jump most players make.
Do not lay a line all the way round. This is the one piece of advice that is peculiar to a wrapping arena, and it is the opposite of what people bring to it from the phone version. There are no edges to hug — every one of the 651 cells is exactly like every other, and the only wall in the game is the one you are making out of yourself. But a body that runs the full width or the full height and closes on itself genuinely does cut the arena in two, and you will be living in whichever half you left yourself. Long diagonal-ish staircases keep your mass together; long straight laps do not.
In a duel, none of that is the main event. The main event is that the other player also cannot stop, and a snake that cuts across the front of another one has taken away a choice rather than a cell. Racing them to the apple is usually the losing play: they are committed to a line, and the space you take from them is worth more than the three cells you would have grown. The seam is worth remembering here too — you can arrive from the side nobody is watching, because on this arena there is no side that is safely behind you. The machines do all of this from SENTINEL upward: WARDEN will reach the apple first and leave you nowhere to be.
Questions
Can I play snake against another person?
Yes, and it is the reason this board exists. Choose snake and search for an opponent and you queue on snake as your topic; the next person who wants the same game lands in a conversation with you, and the arena opens between you with both snakes on it. You are on video while you play unless you turn the camera off — a duel lasts about thirty seconds, which is exactly the length of thing worth doing while you talk.
How does online play stay in step at a hundred ticks a second?
Nobody is in charge, and nothing about the board is sent. Both browsers build the same arena from one seed the server issued and run identical rules over it, so what crosses the wire is only the turns each of you made and the tick each turn happens on — a few bytes, several times a second, repeated so that a lost packet costs nothing. Each frame also carries a checksum of the whole arena, so if the two copies ever disagree the board says so out loud instead of quietly drawing two different games to two people who think they are playing each other.
Is the highscore board actually checked?
Yes, and this is the only real-time game here that can say so. Pong and tetris scores arrive from a browser and are stored at whatever ceiling the rules could plausibly have produced, because by the time one of those runs is over the thousands of decisions that made it are gone. A snake run is not gone: your entire input is a few hundred turns, each stamped with the tick it happened on, so the run is stored as the seed plus that list and the server re-simulates the whole arena from it — every cell of every body, every apple, every tick. The score that goes on the board is the one the replay produced, never the one the browser claimed. If you played a machine, its turns are not submitted at all; the server works them out from the same seed.
Can the arena be solved?
In principle, yes, and the run ends with a note saying so. If a snake ever grows long enough that there is no free cell left to put an apple in, it has covered the board and the game is over as a perfect game rather than a crash. It needs the snake to be following something very close to a Hamiltonian cycle — a route that visits all 651 cells and comes back to where it began. Curiously, the wrapping is what makes that possible at all: on a plain 31 by 21 rectangle there are an odd number of cells and the colours do not balance, so no such cycle exists. Wrap both axes and it does. Either way it is a thing a program can be written to play and a person essentially cannot, so nobody should expect to see it. It is in the rules because a game should know what winning would look like.
Do the walls kill you?
There are no walls. The arena is a torus: go off the right-hand edge and you reappear at the left on the same row, go off the top and you reappear at the bottom in the same column. The edge is drawn as a dashed seam rather than a solid border for exactly that reason — a board that drew a bright hard wall you could pass straight through would be lying about the only rule you have to feel. The things that kill you are your own body and, in a duel, the other snake.
How hard are the machines?
Five, on the same ladder as every other board here: PROBE, DRONE, SENTINEL, WARDEN and OVERMIND. They are not a search — there is no tree in snake worth growing — so a rung is a reaction time and an error rate instead. PROBE looks up three times a second and takes the apple in a straight line without ever counting the room behind a turn; SENTINEL counts the space behind a turn before taking it and will cut you off; OVERMIND looks every nine hundredths of a second, insists on enough room for its whole body, and does not misread a tail.
Do I need to download anything?
No. It runs in the browser, it is free, and it works on a phone — swipe the arena to turn. You need an account to record a run on the highscore board or to duel another person, because both of those attach a result to somebody.
The rest of the arcade
Pong, Tetris, Chess, Oware and Draughts. All of them play the same two ways: against a machine or against a person.