Guide
How to Play Snake
Snake is the arcade game where you never actually move the snake — it is already moving, and all you do is steer. A clock advances it one cell at a time, faster and faster, and your only input is which way it turns next. That single constraint is what separates Snake from every puzzle on Opka: there is no position to think about at your own pace, because the position changes whether you act or not.
The goal is food. Every piece you eat adds a cell to the snake and a point to your score, and the snake you are growing is the same snake you have to avoid. Early on the board is nearly empty and the game feels generous. Fifty points in, you are threading a long body through a shrinking amount of free space at close to double the starting speed, and the thing most likely to kill you is a corner you built yourself three seconds ago.
Opka's table runs the classic rules with one setting to choose: walls or wrap. Walls is the default and the harder game — the edge of the board ends your run. Wrap connects the edges, so leaving the right side brings you back on the left and only your own body can end things. Both are the real game; they just decide whether the board has four hazards or one.
How a run works
The snake starts three cells long in the middle of the 20 by 20 grid, already heading right, with one piece of food placed somewhere else on the board. From then on the clock ticks and the snake advances one cell in whatever direction it is facing. You steer with the arrow keys or WASD on a keyboard, or by swiping on a touchscreen.
Eat the food and three things happen at once: the snake grows by one cell, your score goes up by one, and a new piece of food appears on a randomly chosen empty square. The run ends when the head enters a cell it cannot occupy — the wall, in walls mode, or any part of the snake's own body.
- The snake moves on its own; steering is your only input.
- Each piece of food is one point and one extra cell of snake.
- Food never appears underneath the snake, so it is always reachable.
- One collision ends the run — there is no undo and no extra life.
Walls or wrap
In walls mode the four edges are solid. Steering into one ends the run, which means the outer ring of the board is permanently dangerous and every lap you run around the outside is a lap where a missed turn is fatal. This is the default, and it is the version most people mean by Snake.
In wrap mode the board is a torus: leave the top and you come back on the bottom, leave the left and you come back on the right. Nothing about the food, the growth, or the speed changes — the only difference is that the edges stop being lethal. Long runs get considerably easier, because the one hazard left is your own body, and unlike a wall you can plan where you put it.
- Walls: the board edge ends the run. The default table.
- Wrap: the board edge teleports you to the opposite side.
- Both modes score identically — one point per piece of food.
Scoring and speed
Your score is simply the number of pieces of food you ate. The snake's length is that score plus the three cells it started with, so score and length are the same fact read two ways: a 40-point run is a 43-cell snake. There is no time bonus and no multiplier — a point is a point whether you took the food immediately or spent twenty seconds circling before you did.
Speed is tied to the same number. The snake starts at a readable pace and the clock tightens slightly for every few pieces of food, down to a floor it will not go past. That floor matters: the game is meant to get harder because there is more snake in the way, not because it eventually outruns human reaction time. By the time you reach the floor, the difficulty is coming almost entirely from the space you have left.
Two rules that surprise new players
You cannot turn back on yourself. If the snake is heading right, pressing left does nothing, because reversing would drive the head straight into the neck on the very next tick. Turns are always ninety degrees, and the game simply ignores the one input that would be instant suicide.
You can, however, follow your own tail. The tail vacates its cell on the same tick the head arrives, so steering into the square the last cell is leaving is legal and lands cleanly. This is not a quirk to exploit occasionally — it is the rule that makes tight coils survivable, and every long run depends on it.
Turns are also buffered two deep, so a quick 'up then left' around a corner both register even if you press them faster than one tick apart. The second press is not dropped and not applied early; it waits for the tick after the first.
Why there is no undo
Every other single-player table on Opka lets you take a move back, because those games are puzzles and a mistake is a thinking error you should be able to correct. Snake is a run. The whole difficulty is committing to a line at speed with an incomplete plan, and a button that rewinds the tick that killed you would remove the game rather than soften it. New game is one click, and the next run starts from a fresh board.