Snake

The numbers under the hood

The board is a 22 by 22 grid and you start as a three-segment snake heading right, moving one cell every 150 milliseconds. Each food eaten scores one point and grows you by one segment, and every third food shortens the step interval by 6 milliseconds until it bottoms out at 60, which the game reaches after 45 food. That top speed is nearly 17 moves per second, and it is where all long runs eventually go to die. Walls do not wrap: touching a wall or any part of your own body ends the run, the classic rule set. Food always spawns on a free cell, never inside you, and your best score is saved in this browser.

Steering, and the input trap to know about

Arrow keys or WASD on desktop, swipes of at least 24 pixels on touch. Direct reversals are ignored, so you can never fold into your own neck by mashing the opposite key. But there is a subtler trap built into how classic snake processes input, this version included: your direction is applied once per movement tick, and pressing two turns within a single tick keeps only the second one. Try to whip a fast U-turn by tapping up then left in one motion and the left press gets checked against your old heading, counts as a reversal, and is discarded. The fix is rhythm: one turn per tick, deliberately. At starting speed a tick is 150 milliseconds and this never bites; at top speed you have 60 milliseconds per input, and the players who survive there are the ones tapping in time with the snake rather than ahead of it.

Strategy for actually getting long

Early game, take the shortest path to food, since speed is low and your tail is short. Past roughly 20 food, stop chasing and start farming: sweep the board in a boustrophedon pattern, up one column, down the next, collecting food as your lawnmower path happens to cross it. It feels slower and scores faster, because the pattern keeps your tail behind you by construction and eliminates the self-trap deaths that end greedy runs. Guard the walls with extra respect at high speed; a wall gives you no second chance, while open-field mistakes sometimes leave an exit. And keep your head out of corners unless your tail's exit route is already visible: a corner entered at 60 milliseconds per tick with no plan is a completed run.

Honest notes

Scoring is food eaten, flat, with no multipliers, no speed bonus, and no points for style. The speed ramp is fully deterministic, so two runs of equal length play identically fast, and any difference in difficulty you feel is your snake's length, not the game cheating. Food placement is uniformly random over free cells, which means late-game food can land in genuinely rude spots next to your own body; that is fair dice, not malice. There is no pause button, no wrap mode, and no obstacles, on purpose: the classic rule set is the benchmark version of this game, and your best score here is comparable to decades of snake players before you. The score lives in local storage and goes nowhere else.