press play to start
Eat, grow, and eventually run out of room
Three segments to start. Every apple adds one and the board doesn’t get any bigger, so the difficulty comes entirely from your own tail. Nothing chases you. You lose to yourself, every time, which is why this one has survived forty years of hardware changes.
The grid is drawn faintly under the board so you can see the cells you’re moving between. It helps more than you’d expect on the tight turns.
- Hug the edges early. The middle is where you get trapped later.
- Leave yourself an exit before you go into a corner for an apple.
- Once you’re past twenty segments, plan two turns ahead instead of one.
- With walls off, wrapping around an edge is often the fastest route across the board.
walls on or off
Solid walls are the strict version. Hit the edge and it’s over. Turn them off and you pass through one side and come out the other, which sounds easier and is, right up until you wrap into your own tail without meaning to.
the speed setting
Three tiers. Normal is comfortable. Fast is where the input timing starts to matter, because you can queue a turn slightly too early and lose it. The top tier is genuinely unfair and exists for people who want a short game.
on a phone
Swipe anywhere on the board, or use the pad below it. The pad is easier for long runs since your thumb stays in one place instead of dragging across the play area.
other things to play here
If you want a maze and something chasing you, google pac-man is the fuller game, with four ghosts that each track you differently. dinosaur game is the one-button runner with cacti and birds.
For shooting instead of dodging, space invaders google puts a cannon under a descending grid of aliens, and google block breaker gives you a paddle and a wall of bricks.
And if you’d rather stop scoring points and just wreck something, zerg rush game lets a swarm eat the search results while you click to fight it off.