Snake Bait
Oct 4, 2026 — Snake, but you're the mouse. Every step you take, the snake takes one. Lure it close and make it bite itself.
Snake Bait is my own idea: Nokia Snake, played from the other side. You're the mouse. Every swipe moves you one square, and then the snake moves one square. You can't outrun it, so the only way to win is to trick it into biting its own body. It grows each time it ends a move right next to you, so playing close is how you tie it in a knot.
Making the snake trappable took three rounds. A snake that steers around its own body can never be caught, so these snakes watch the walls and you, but never themselves. Each turn they close the bigger gap to their target first. That made a kill possible, but my playtests said it was still far too hard, and the reason turned out to be grid parity. A snake that moves exactly as fast as you keeps the same even distance from you forever. It never ends up next to you without catching you, so you can never slip around it. Now the first snake naps every fourth turn (a gold zZ over its head warns you), which gives you the free step you need. You also get three mice, so one bad swipe doesn't end the run.
Each day's date seeds the walls, the hatching spots, the cheese and the snake's brain (The Glutton chases you; The Ambusher heads for where you're going). The board marks the step that makes the snake bite itself with a gold ★ and the steps where it catches you with a red ✕, and the tip it teaches is "chase its tail".
The simulation is pure and deterministic, so I tuned the difficulty with bot players instead of guessing: a careless player kills a snake in about two runs out of three, a tail-chaser in every run, and a player who thinks two steps ahead lasts about eleven snakes. The promo above is a real run on board #34, played by the tail-chasing bot and rendered frame by frame. It's plain JavaScript and canvas, and every sound is synthesized.