Snake

You start as a short snake in a crowd of thirty bots. Move the pointer and your snake turns toward it, the same way it does in snake.io. On a touch screen, drag a finger anywhere on the board to steer and use the lightning button to boost.

Eat the small dots to grow. Every three dots add one segment to your body, so a long snake is a well fed one. The camera follows your head and pulls back as you grow, so a big snake can see more of the board.

Touch another snake with your head and you are out. It does not matter whether you hit its head, its middle or the tip of its tail. If two heads meet, both snakes are out.

Your own body is harmless, so you can coil around yourself freely. That makes a tight spiral a good place to rest while you look for a gap to leave through.

Whoever you run into earns the credit. Every snake counts the others it has knocked out, and bots use that when they learn.

Small dots are worth one point each and are scattered everywhere. Large blocks with a dark outline are worth ten, the same as ten small dots, and they only appear when a snake falls or when someone boosts.

A snake that is knocked out leaves one large block for every three segments of its length. A short snake leaves a single block while a long one leaves a line of them, so the biggest snakes are also the biggest prizes.

Food turns into length three points at a time and the remainder carries over to your next pickup.

Your score is the total value of everything you have eaten this run. The board in the top right ranks all thirty-one snakes by length and shows the top ten, with your own row highlighted in terracotta. If you drop below tenth place, your row appears at the bottom with your real rank.

Your best score is stored in this browser only. There is no account and nothing is uploaded.

Thirty bots share the board: Nova, Pip, Ziggy, Mango, Sable, Juniper, Biscuit, Orbit, Ember, Pickle, Waffle, Comet, Fig, Dash, Moss, Atlas, Bean, Cosmo, Dune, Echo, Flint, Gizmo, Hazel, Indigo, Jinx, Kiwi, Lumen, Mochi, Nimbus, Olive. Each has its own skin, pattern and face, so you can tell them apart at a glance, and each has its name above its head.

A bot that is knocked out comes back a few seconds later with a fresh genome, so there are always thirty on the board. They steer toward food, swerve away from bodies, speed up to grab large blocks, escape tight spots, and sometimes chase a smaller snake to cut it off.

Every bot plays with a handful of numbers: how far ahead it looks, how much it fears bodies, how strongly it chases large blocks, how often it hunts and how eagerly it boosts. When a bot falls, its numbers and how well it did are scored by length reached, snakes it knocked out and how long it survived.

The best performers are kept, and each new bot is a slightly changed copy of one of them. The first time you open the page the bots practise in the background so they are not hopeless, and what they learn is saved in this browser, so they keep improving the more you play.

Nothing is downloaded for the audio. Every sound is calculated in your browser from note frequencies and played through the Web Audio API.

Eating climbs a pentatonic scale, so a streak of pickups sounds like a rising run, and large blocks play a short chord. The background music is generated too: a slow chord loop in a minor key with a bass line and a random but musical arpeggio, so it never repeats exactly. It plays only while you are in a game.

Are the other snakes real players? No. They are bots that run entirely in your browser and respawn after falling.

What happens at the edge of the board? Leaving one side brings you back in from the opposite side.

Does it work on a phone? Yes. Drag to steer and tap the lightning button to boost.

Can I play full screen? Yes. Pressing Start enters full screen on its own, and the full screen button does the same at any time. Leaving full screen pauses the game.