Snake

• Use the wrap deliberately. If the food is near the opposite edge, carrying straight on through the side is often fewer moves than turning back, and it keeps your body in one long line instead of a coil.
• Food only ever appears in the top five rows, plus the left-hand square of the sixth. The bottom of the board never grows anything, so time spent down there is time wasted. Keep the snake in the upper half and you will travel less between meals.
• Steer in long straight runs and turn once, rather than making a staircase of small turns. A straight body leaves an obvious gap to come back into; a staircase of turns fills the middle of the board with squares you cannot re-enter.
• Only the last direction you press before the snake steps has any effect. Pressing three keys quickly does not queue three turns; the last one wins. Press once, watch the step happen, then press again.
• The snake steps once every three quarters of a second at the start, which is slow. Press the key a moment before you reach the corner you want, not as you arrive at it.
• It speeds up at fixed points, not gradually — after your third, sixth, tenth, fifteenth and twentieth piece of food. Those are the moments people lose games, so slow down your own thinking just as the game quickens.
• Until you have eaten three pieces of food the snake is too short to reach its own tail, whatever you do. Use those first moves to see where the food appears and to settle into a rhythm.
• You cannot reverse straight back into your own neck; that press is ignored. When you need to go the other way, make two turns rather than one, and give yourself the room to make the second one.

The four arrow keys steer the snake and nothing else does — there is no W A S D here, and no other key does anything. Click or tap the board once before you begin, so the keys reach the game rather than the page around it. On a touchscreen you swipe, and the swipe has to cover about a tenth of the screen before it counts, so a short flick of the thumb may be ignored while a definite stroke across the board is read every time. The snake will not move at all until your first press, so you can take as long as you want to look at the board first. There is no clock and no pause button, but a game rarely runs long, and losing costs nothing.

Only forty-nine squares fill the whole frame, so each one is large — this is a much bigger, plainer board than most versions of this game. The snake is green with a darker head, the food is yellow, and the squares are near-white with black lines between them. The colour around the outside of the board is picked at random each time the game loads, so the surround may be blue one day and brown the next; the board itself never changes. When you die the head turns red and the panel returns after about two seconds with a Play Again button. Nothing covers the board while you are playing. Your score is not saved anywhere, so every game starts again from zero, and the game can be won outright: reach 1500 points, which is thirty pieces of food, and a finishing message appears.

This shape of game goes back to Blockade, an arcade cabinet released by Gremlin in 1976, in which two players drew a growing trail behind them and tried to make the other one crash first. A home version followed on the Atari console in 1977, and by 1978 a one-player variant called Worm had been written for the TRS-80 home computer. The idea travelled well because it needs almost nothing: a grid, a line that gets longer, and one rule about not touching yourself.

What made it famous was a telephone. In 1997 Taneli Armanto, a design engineer at Nokia, wrote a version small enough for the Nokia 6110 and it was preloaded on the handset. It went on to ship on a great many Nokia phones, and for a whole generation it was the first video game they owned, played on a monochrome screen while waiting for a bus. Our copy keeps the original grid small and the pace slow to start with, which suits a game played with one hand. If you would like something in the same spirit but calmer, Maze Chase and the rest of our arcade games are close by, and Mahjong has no hurry in it at all.

This is a self-hosted, open-source version of Snake (source), used under its MIT licence and hosted here so it loads fast and shows no third-party adverts inside the game. Browse all of our free games.