How to play
Use the arrow keys or swipe to steer. Eat pellets, avoid walls and your own body. Tap to restart.
About Neon Snake
Neon Snake is the snake game most of us first met on an old mobile phone, rebuilt for the browser with a glowing green snake on a dark grid. You steer, the snake eats, the snake grows, and sooner or later the thing you crash into is yourself. It was a great idea decades ago and it still is.
The rules
The board is a square of twenty by twenty cells. Your snake starts out a single block long and sets off to the right. Somewhere on the grid sits a red pellet. Run over it and you score a point, the snake gains one segment, and a new pellet appears in a random spot.
The snake never stops moving. It ends the game in one of two ways: by hitting the edge of the board, or by running into its own body. There is no wrapping around from one side to the other here, so the walls are every bit as dangerous as your tail. When the run ends, tap or click to start again from a single block.
Controls
On a computer, use the four arrow keys. On a phone or tablet, swipe in the direction you want to go. The snake cannot reverse straight back on itself, so if you are heading right, a press to the left is simply ignored. That saves you from the most annoying kind of accident.
One thing worth knowing: the snake takes a step roughly eight times a second, and it turns on the next step after you give the order. Give your instruction a fraction early, especially near a wall.
How to survive longer
Early on, the board is empty and you can go where you like. The habits you form then decide how the late game goes. The classic approach is to keep the snake tidy. Sweep along the edges and fold back and forth in neat rows, rather than cutting diagonally across the middle whenever a pellet appears. A tidy snake leaves open space. A scribbled one builds walls in front of itself.
Before you go for a pellet, look at where you will be after you have eaten it. The pellet is rarely the dangerous part. The dead end behind it is. If a pellet sits in a pocket surrounded by your own body, it is often better to take a lap and let your tail move out of the way first.
Remember that your tail is always moving away from you. A gap that is closed now may be open by the time you arrive, and with practice you start to judge that timing by feel.
Scores to aim for
Ten is a decent first try. Thirty means you have started planning routes instead of reacting. Past fifty the snake fills a good part of the board, and every pellet becomes a small puzzle. The grid has four hundred cells, so in theory there is a long way to go.
Why it is worth a few minutes
Neon Snake asks for no reading and no setup. A game lasts anywhere from ten seconds to several minutes depending on your nerve, and it always ends with the feeling that the next attempt will go better. It runs in the browser on any device, free, with nothing to download.