How to Play
Eat, grow, and keep your head out of everybody else's way. There are two games: Classic, an arena that never closes, and Royale, thirty snakes in a circle that does. Nothing here is locked, and nothing needs an account — signing in only gives your coins and your wins somewhere to live.
Steering and boost
Keyboard and mouse
WASD or the arrow keys, to steer.
Spaceheld, to boost.
Escfor the pause menu, and to close it.
Or use the mouse and forget the keys: your snake aims from the middle of the screen towards the pointer, and follows it wherever it goes.
Let go and you keep the heading you had. A snake never stops.
On a phone
The screen is split down the middle. Press anywhere in the steering half and a stick appears under your thumb — only the direction counts, so a small drag turns as hard as a big one. Hold the other half to boost.
A thumb keeps the job of the half it started in, so sliding across the middle while boosting never steals your steering. Three settings under the cog: swap the sides if you are left-handed, pin the stick in one place instead of under your thumb, and double-tap to boost so one thumb can do both.
What you are looking at
1
2
3
4
Classic
One circle, fixed, and it never closes. Drop in whenever you like and play for as long as you last — two dozen snakes are already in there, and up to thirty players can share it.
The rim is solid. Touch it and you are dead, which makes the edge of the map a wall to fight along rather than a place to hide.
Online, lead the field for twenty unbroken seconds and you wear the leader's crown until somebody takes the lead off you. Falling behind for a moment resets the clock, so it has to be defended rather than merely reached.
Classic is the only game with a paid revive: the run is yours to carry on with.
Royale
Thirty snakes, one round, one winner. Online, it opens with a twenty-second warm-up you can actually play in — steer, fight, get eaten, come straight back. None of it counts. When the clock runs out that practice arena is thrown away and the scored one opens after 3–2–1.
The seven rings of a Royale, at the radii the game really uses — 5000 units down to 200.
The circle then closes in seven steps. Each holds, then shrinks — and each lands off-centre, so heading for the middle is the wrong instinct and you have to keep reading where the next one is going.
Outside it, the storm eats your length rather than killing you outright: a dash back inside is a gamble worth taking. It bites harder the longer you stay out, and it does finish the job — a snake that never comes back is eaten down to nothing and dies.
Win one while signed in and it goes on the winners board — and from then on you wear a gold crown in every match you join, Classic ones included. Not for the next game: for good.
A Royale runs to a finish. Once you are out you are out — there is no dropping back into a round you have died in, and no buying your way back.
What kills you, and what does not
Only your head can kill you. Run it into any part of another snake and that is your run over. Nothing else on the field is dangerous to touch: their body can lie right across yours all day, and you can cross your own trail as often as you like.
Which is why the move is to get in front of somebody rather than chase them. Everything a dead snake was made of drops as food in its own colours, so you can see whose remains you are eating from across the arena. A big kill is a big prize — and it is gone in forty-five seconds, so dive for it.
Boost costs you
Boosting spends about six length a second, and every bit of it falls behind you as pellets somebody else can eat. It is an escape, not a way of getting about — and a snake worn down to the minimum cannot boost at all until it has eaten again.
Getting big costs you too
The bigger you are, the smaller the share of each pellet you keep — at nine hundred length you are down to half of it, so a huge score costs far more food than a merely good one. A long snake is also slower and turns wider than a short one. Size is a lead, not a shield: the small snake behind you can out-turn you.
The fat drifting pellets
Four of them wander the arena, each worth about ten ordinary pellets, and they hold off for the first ten seconds of a round. They are the one thing two snakes will both go for, which is exactly what makes them worth watching.
What they are for
Coins buy two things, and the first is carrying on after you die in Classic. You come back in the same round, at the size you died, rather than starting over.
The first one in a game costs 50. The next costs 100, then 200, then 400, holding at 800 from the fifth on — so every life you buy is a different decision from the last. Leave for the lobby without buying one and the next game starts at fifty again.
You earn them by winning a Royale online: come first and the server pays 3. That is the only way the game gives them away — a Classic run has no finish to come first in. They need an account to live in, so signed out there is nowhere to keep them, and they can also be bought outright.
The second thing they buy is impatience. Levelling up opens patterns, eyes and hats in the snake builder for nothing; paying 50 opens one now. Nothing is ever coins-only, so a player who never spends a penny still ends up owning all of it.
Themes, flags, eye sizes, pupils and brows are free at every level. A theme is a background and the palette measured to read on it, so charging for one would be charging for legibility.
Flashing lights
Eating a big pellet briefly washes the screen with its colour. That wash is limited to twice a second at most, well under the accepted seizure-safe rate.
Settings has an Off / Normal / Strong control for it. The limit of two a second applies whichever you pick: the setting changes how bright one flash is, never how many there are.
Turn on Reduce Motion in your device or browser accessibility settings and the wash is dropped entirely, whatever is chosen above. Nothing else about the game changes.
A very small number of people can have seizures triggered by flashing lights. If you feel dizzy or disoriented, or your vision alters, stop playing and see a doctor.
Go and get eaten a few times
Solo is the same arena with the same rules and nobody watching, which makes it the right place to find out how wide you turn at four hundred length. Online is where the coins and the winners board are.