How to play Snake

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Snake, played straight — but the snake is something you drive. Eat, grow by one segment, don't fold yourself in half. The twist is what you're driving: a steam train, an articulated lorry, a wagon train, or an actual snake.

The goal

You move on a fixed grid of 15 columns by 19 rows. Somewhere on it sits one pickup. Reach it and two things happen: your score goes up by one, and your rig gets one segment longer. A new pickup appears somewhere else, and you go again.

There is no finish line. The run ends when you hit a wall or run into your own body, and your score is simply how many pickups you collected before that happened. The rules are deliberately the classic ones — no power-ups, no portals, no wrap-around edges, nothing that lets you out of a corner you drove yourself into.

Controls

Swipes work anywhere on the screen that isn't a button, including below the board, so you never have to reach up to steer. A short flick is enough — you don't need to drag across the board. One rule is absolute in every control scheme: you cannot turn back into yourself. A reversal is simply refused rather than killing you.

Two ways to move

Pick one on the start screen. The rules are identical in both — same grid, same growth, same collisions, same speed ramp. The only difference is what makes the rig move.

Drive

The classic. Your rig advances on its own, forever, and all you do is steer. It never stops and never waits, so every turn is a decision made at speed. This is the mode where the ramp really bites and where a long run feels like an achievement.

Pull

The engine comes out. Now it only moves while you're pulling it: a tap is worth exactly one tile, holding a direction keeps it coming at the current speed, and letting go parks it square on a tile. On a phone you can also just put a finger on the board and drag — the head walks toward your finger, one cell at a time, re-deciding as you move, so it trails you round the board like you're hauling it along a track.

Standing still in Pull is completely free. There is no starve timer and nothing punishes you for stopping to think — park in the middle of your own coil and work out the exit at your leisure. It turns Snake from a reaction game into a planning one.

Because Pull removes the clock pressure that makes Drive hard, the two modes keep separate high scores. Your Drive best can't be quietly beaten by a leisurely Pull run.

How it speeds up

Every pickup makes the rig a little quicker. The step interval starts around 185ms and decays as you collect, but it flattens out rather than running away — it can never drop below about 78ms, roughly a second and a bit to cross the whole board. The six pips beside your score show where you currently sit on that ramp.

The result is that the difficulty comes from your own length far more than from the speed. By the time you're moving fast you're also long enough that the board is mostly you.

The four rigs

Each rig changes what you're driving, what you're collecting, and what a new segment looks like. None of them change the rules: the hitbox is one grid cell for every rig, so a skin is pure character and never an advantage.

Steam train — eats coal

A locomotive with a cowcatcher and a gold-ringed stack up front, a caboose on the tail. Every lump of coal hitches on another car, and the consist cycles through boxcars, tank cars and loaded coal hoppers as it grows, so a long train looks like a real train rather than a repeated block.

Semi truck — eats tyres

A red cab-over tractor unit at the head, roll-up rear doors on the last trailer. Each tyre you pick up adds another trailer, alternating silver dry vans and gold curtainsides. Long runs turn into a genuinely absurd road train.

Wagon train — eats supplies

A yoked pair of oxen hauling covered wagons west, on brand for the rest of what we make. Every crate of supplies puts another prairie schooner on the trail, and the rear wagon carries a water barrel lashed to the back.

Classic snake — eats apples

The homage, and the odd one out. A real snake has no seams, so this one is drawn as a single continuous body: a broad scaled head that flows out of the neck, a tapering tail that ends in a point, and no joints anywhere. Growth just makes it longer.

Two art sets

A toggle on the start screen switches between the hand-drawn Vector art and an experimental Painted set, and each rig gets its own faintly themed ground so you always know where you are:

Railyard ballast & railsHighway asphalt Prairie dirt trailGarden lawn

The backdrops are deliberately held down in contrast so the rig, the pickup and the grid stay the readable things on top of them.

Tips that keep a run alive

Leave yourself a door

The classic Snake mistake is sealing a region of the board off from itself. Before you commit to a route, check that whatever space you're driving into still connects back to the rest of the board. A pickup you can reach but not leave is a trap, not a point.

Hug the edges early

Coiling around the outside keeps the middle open and leaves your body as one continuous wall rather than a maze of your own making. Loose spaghetti in the centre is what kills long runs.

Follow your own tail

The tail cell empties on the same step you enter it, so driving directly into where your tail is right now is legal. That's the standard escape from a tight coil, and it's worth practising deliberately in Pull before you need it at speed.

Turn early, not late

Turns are queued, and up to two are held. Committing a fraction early costs nothing and gives the rig time to take the corner; waiting until the wall is on top of you is how a good run ends.

Learn the board in Pull

If a shape keeps killing you, switch to Pull and work through it a tile at a time. The geometry is identical, so anything you learn there transfers straight back to Drive.

Good to know

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