Strategy guides › Snake
How to score big in Snake: lanes, tail-chasing and the perfect loop
The snake is sixty squares long, the food has just appeared on the far side of your own body, and the shortest route to it goes through a gap one square wide. You take it. Three seconds later you are boxed into a pocket of your own making, and the only exit is your tail.
That is how almost every good Snake game ends: not with a wall, but with a shortcut. This guide is about when to take the shortcut and when not to, with numbers from the game’s own rules.
What the game is actually doing
Our board is 20 by 20, which is 400 squares. You start three squares long in the middle, heading right, so the highest possible score is 397. Every dot you eat adds one square and one point, and makes the game faster.
The speed rule is simple, and worth knowing. On Normal the snake moves one square every 150 milliseconds, minus 4 milliseconds for every point, until it bottoms out at 70 milliseconds per square. That floor arrives at 20 points. Slow starts at 200 and reaches the same 70 floor at 33 points. Fast starts at 105 and bottoms out at 55 milliseconds, about 18 squares a second, after only 13 points. In other words, after the first minute every game is the same speed, and the speed picker only decides how gently you get there.
Two more details from the code shape everything else. First, the game remembers up to two turns ahead, so a quick double tap (up, then left) makes a tight U-turn even though you can never reverse directly. Second, and this one surprises people, your tail is solid until it moves. The game checks for a collision before the tail steps forward, so driving your head into the square your tail is leaving still kills you.
Why the shortest path kills you
To see what works, we wrote three autopilots that follow the game’s exact rules (same board, same start, same collision check, food dropped on a random free square) and played each one hundreds of times.
The first goes straight for the food along the shortest route that avoids its body. The second does the same, but before committing it asks one question: after I eat, can my head still reach my tail? If not, it follows its own tail instead and waits for a better moment. The third ignores the food entirely and follows a fixed route through every square, which we will come to. We ran 500 games of the first, 150 of the second and 20 of the third.
| Autopilot | Median score | Top 10% | Median time on Normal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shortest path | 63 | 84+ | 1.4 min |
| Shortest path, tail check | 153 | 250+ | 4.6 min |
| Fixed loop | 397 | 397 | 53 min |
The greedy snake dies around 60 points, when it is long enough to wall itself off. The single question about the tail more than doubles the score. That question is the habit to build: before you dive for a dot, look at where your tail is and ask whether the path you are about to take leaves a door back to it. Your tail is the one part of the board that is guaranteed to open up, because it is always leaving.
Sweep in lanes
Chasing the tail sounds abstract at 14 squares a second. The practical version is lanes. Run the snake along one wall, turn, come back one row over, turn, and so on, like mowing a lawn. Then a long snake lies in neat parallel strips, every strip ends next to the next one, and the tail is always somewhere along the same sweep, a predictable distance behind you. When food appears, you leave the lane only if you can get to it and fall back into the sweep without crossing your own body.
The thing lanes protect you from is the pocket: a region of empty squares sealed off by your own body with a single entrance. Enter a pocket smaller than your length and you will die in it. Lanes don’t create pockets; diagonal zigzags towards the food do.
The loop that cannot lose
The extreme version of lanes is a route that visits every square on the board exactly once and returns to its start, known as a Hamiltonian cycle. On a board with an even side, like our 20 by 20, one is easy to draw: along the top row, then back and forth down the board, then straight up the left-hand column to the start.
A snake that only ever follows this loop can never hit itself: its body always lies on the stretch of loop just behind its head, so the square ahead is free until the snake is as long as the board. Our autopilot filled the board in all 20 games, scoring the maximum 397. The catch is time: it needs a median of about 43,000 steps, which is 53 minutes on Normal and 40 on Fast. Nobody plays that, and nobody needs to. The useful part for a human is the shape: long straight runs, one turn per row, a reserved corridor home. Use the loop while the snake is long and the board is crowded, and take shortcuts across it only while you are short.
Practice
Snake has no seeded puzzles, so practise the habit instead. Play one game on Slow where you never go for a dot unless you can say where your tail will be when you get there. It feels slow, and it is exactly the habit that separates our 153-point autopilot from the 63-point one.
The food is never the goal. The goal is always having a way out, and food is what you pick up on the way.
