There are two ways to die in Snake, and almost everyone graduates from the first to the second within a few games.
Beginners hit the wall. Everyone else builds a pocket out of their own tail and walks into it.
Self-trapping is the whole problem
Once your snake is twenty or thirty segments long, the board is divided into regions by your own body. A region is safe only if it is large enough to hold the tail still following you, and connected to the rest of the board by a gap you can actually fit through.
The habit that fixes this is one question, asked before every turn:
If I go this way, can I still get back out?
That is it. It slows you down, it feels overcautious, and it roughly doubles most people’s scores. Deaths that feel like bad luck are almost always a region you entered eight moves earlier that was never going to work.
Turn late, travel straight
Every turn leaves a fold of tail behind, and folds are what fragment the board.
A snake that travels the full length of the board and turns at the edge occupies a tidy line. The same snake taking six small turns through the middle occupies the same number of squares while cutting the board into four pieces. Same length, dramatically worse position.
So: long straight runs, turns as late as the geometry allows, and turns near edges rather than in the middle.
Hug the walls early
While the snake is short, keep it packed against the edges.
This is counterintuitive — the walls are what kill beginners — but a tail stored along the perimeter leaves the centre open, and the centre is the space you need when the snake gets long. A tail spread through the middle looks safer and steadily eats the only region with room to manoeuvre.
Do not chase food
When food spawns somewhere awkward — behind your own tail, or in a corner you would have to commit to — the correct move is frequently to ignore it for a lap.
Food does not expire. Circling once to approach from a better angle costs you a few seconds and nothing else. Diving at food through a gap that closes behind you costs you the run.
This is the single biggest difference between a fifty-point game and a two-hundred-point game.
Follow your own tail
The tail square you are moving into vacates on the same tick, so trailing your own tail is legal and safe. Our version implements this correctly, as any Snake should.
It is the standard stalling manoeuvre: when you need time to think, or when the food is somewhere you cannot safely reach yet, follow your tail in a loop until the position improves. You lose nothing by doing it.
Walls versus wrap
Wrap-around mode connects the edges, so leaving the right side brings you back on the left. Wall deaths become impossible.
For the first thirty seconds this is obviously easier. Past a certain length it is arguably harder, and the reason is instructive: in walls mode you can press your tail against a boundary and rely on it staying out of the way. In wrap mode there are no boundaries, so the tail spreads across the middle and every region is potentially connected to every other one — which sounds good until you realise it also means no region is reliably safe.
Players who score highly in one mode often find the other genuinely difficult. They are closer to different games than they look.
Speed is not the difficulty
The snake speeds up as it grows, but the interval bottoms out rather than shrinking forever. That is deliberate: a game that becomes a pure reaction test at length forty stops rewarding the planning that makes it interesting.
Past the floor, everything that kills you is a decision you made several seconds ago.