Play Snake free online — steer the snake to eat apples and grow longer without biting yourself. The timeless classic, now on CerdikCerdik.
🐍 Snake
Eat the apples without hitting yourself!
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Eat apples to grow. Don't bite yourself!
Arrow keys / WASD on desktop · D-pad or swipe on mobile
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Register Free 🚀About Snake
Snake is the game that came free on a Nokia and outlived the phone. Eat the food, grow one segment longer, and never run into yourself. The board is 20 by 20 and the edges wrap around, so the walls cannot kill you — the whole difficulty of the game comes from the fact that your problem gets worse every time you succeed.
Success is the difficulty
Almost no other game works this way. Every point you score makes the board more dangerous, because the snake you must avoid is the snake you have been building. A long snake is not a trophy, it is an obstacle course of your own making.
This is why scores climb slowly at first and then collapse suddenly. The board does not get harder gradually — it gets harder in proportion to how well you have already done.
The board has no corners
Because every edge wraps, this board is really a loop in both directions. Drive off the right-hand side and you reappear on the left, at the same height, still moving. There is no corner to be pinned into and no wall to be crushed against, which removes the classic way of dying in Snake entirely.
That changes what good play looks like. The only obstacle on the board is your own body, so the discipline is to keep it tidy: travel in long parallel lanes rather than scribbles, because a body laid out in neat rows leaves predictable gaps, while one that has wandered through the middle cuts the board into regions you then have to navigate around.
It also changes the shortest route. Food near the left edge may be closer going right, straight off the side of the screen, than going left across the whole board. Players who came from wall-killing versions of Snake spend their first few games not seeing those routes at all.
Leave yourself an exit
Before you commit to a direction, the question is not whether it reaches the food but whether you can get out again afterwards. Most deaths are not collisions you failed to see — they are collisions that became unavoidable several moves earlier, when you entered a pocket with only one way out.
When the snake gets long, follow your own tail. The tail moves away as you advance, so the space directly behind it is always about to be free, which makes it the safest region on a crowded board.
The three speeds
Easy moves the snake every 180 milliseconds, Medium every 120 and Hard every 75. Hard is roughly two and a half times the pace of Easy, which changes the game qualitatively rather than just quantitatively.
At 180ms you have time to plan a route to the food. At 75ms you do not — you have to already know your route, which means the planning has to happen before the food appears rather than after. Players who move up to Hard and keep planning reactively find their scores fall by more than the speed difference alone would explain.
Frequently asked questions
Can you finish Snake?
In principle yes — filling all 400 squares of the board completes it, and because the walls cannot kill you, a perfect player never loses. In practice almost nobody gets close, because the last stretch requires planning a path that visits every remaining square without trapping yourself.
Does the snake pass through walls?
Yes. Every edge wraps around, so leaving the right-hand side brings you back on the left at the same height, and the same applies top to bottom. The only thing that ends a run is colliding with your own body.
How do I control it on a phone?
Swipe in the direction you want to turn. On a keyboard, use the arrow keys. You cannot reverse directly into your own neck, which prevents an unfair instant loss from a stray input.
Why does my score drop so much on Hard?
Because Hard removes planning time rather than adding obstacles. At 75 milliseconds per step you are reacting, and reacting is not enough once the snake is long — the route has to be decided before you need it.