- Kind
- Arcade snake
- Players
- One
- A round
- One run, arena after arena
- Runs on
- Phone or desktop browser with WebGL
What you do
Snake in a walled neon arena 18 cells wide and 30 tall, moving 7.5 cells a second. Food makes you one segment longer. Enemies die only one way: steer your head into the side of your own body, and everything inside the loop you just closed is crushed. Then the loop is shed, so you come out that many segments shorter. A ring only two cells wide has no inside, so touching your side like that is a bite, and a bite ends the run.
Crushing several at once pays more: one enemy in a loop is 10 points, two are 30, three 60, four 100. Crush again within three seconds for a combo multiplier. Every 8 food or kills fills a meter and the game freezes to offer three mutations, of 25 in nine families; the one you pick lasts the run.
A run is a string of arenas, five to a sector, each with one goal: the first is eat 10, and the others ask you to eat 12, crush 4 or survive 40 seconds. Hunters chase your head, Spitters show their aim for two thirds of a second before they fire, and Swarms crowd. Running into a wall, an enemy or a shot ends it.
Controls
Phone
- Swipe anywhere on the arena to turn. The turn fires once your finger has moved 24 pixels, before you lift it — keep your thumb down and bend the stroke to chain a second turn.
- Tap a card to pick a mutation.
Keyboard and mouse
- Arrows WASD
- turn
- 1 2 3
- pick a mutation card
- Space
- go again after a run
- Esc
- back to the title
How long a round takes
A run lasts until you crash. Clearing an arena's goal warps you to the next after a one-second pause; after the fifth, the next sector's eat and crush targets are half as large again and survive goals 10 seconds longer. You never speed up, and neither do the enemies — they just arrive more often. Two turns can be queued ahead of the snake, and a turn straight back into your own neck is ignored rather than killing you. If the tab loses focus the run pauses.
Daily Run on the title screen plays today's seed, the same arenas, spawns and offers for everyone until 00:00 UTC. Your first one of the day is the scored one; every run after it is practice.
The honest limits
The arcade draws with WebGL, so a browser with it switched off cannot run it. A gamepad works as well (d-pad or left stick). The same site also has a slower game, the daily snake puzzle: one 19×19 board a day where your tail never shortens and nothing is timed.