How to play Feed Blind Snake

Feed Blind Snake is the classic Snake game with one thing taken away: the food is never drawn on the board. You can see your snake and the walls, but the thing you are hunting is invisible. Instead of steering towards a dot, you use one of three hints — Direction, Steps, or Temperature — to find it.

It is free, runs in any browser, and needs no download or account. Play Feed Blind Snake whenever you want to try the ideas below.

The rules you already know

The board is 20 by 20 cells.
While the game is running, your snake keeps moving forward one cell at a time.
Eating food scores one point and makes the snake one segment longer.
Hitting a wall ends the run — the board does not wrap around.
Hitting your own body ends the run too.

The twist: nothing marks the food

A normal game of Snake is a steering problem. This one is a searching problem. The food sits on a real cell of the grid the whole time — it is just not visible. Your selected hint above the screen is the only guide to its location. When you finally crash, the game outlines the cell the food was occupying — which is when you can see how close you were.

Controls

Choose hint: tap Direction, Steps, or Temperature on the ready screen, or press H on a keyboard to cycle through the modes.
Choose level: tap a 1–9 button on the ready screen, or press a number key from 1 to 9 on a keyboard.
Start, pause, resume, restart: click the start prompt with a mouse, tap the game board itself on a touchscreen, or press the space bar on a keyboard. A tap outside the board does nothing, so holding the phone by its edges cannot pause your run by accident.
Turn: after the game starts, swipe anywhere on the page on a touchscreen — unlike tapping, swipes are not fussy this way and count from anywhere on the page — or press an arrow key or WASD on a keyboard. Direction keys do not start the game while the ready screen is open.

With a mouse, the hint and 1–9 buttons and the start prompt on the ready screen can be clicked. The board itself is not clickable, so steering and pausing during a run use the keyboard.

The three hint modes

You choose your hint mode on the ready screen before the game starts, and it locks in once the run begins. The hint bar above the screen shows ? until then.

Direction is the gentlest. An arrow points from your head toward the food, so you always have a correct move available — but it never says how far.
Steps is the middle setting, and the most information in the game: the exact number of moves needed. It tells you nothing about which way, so you have to work that out by moving.
Temperature is the hardest. It just tells you if you are getting closer (WARMER) or farther (COLDER) — nothing more.

The selected mode is named in the hint bar while you play.

The nine speed levels

You choose your speed level on the ready screen before the game starts, and it locks in once the run begins. There are nine speeds to choose from. Level 1 moves the snake about two and a half squares a second — slow enough to read a hint and plan the next turn — and each level after that moves it a little faster, up to level 9 at around seven squares a second, just under three times quicker. A faster snake does not just make steering harder — it gives you less time to read and think about the hint, too. That is why the level is a difficulty setting for reading as much as for reflexes.

Best scores per hint and level

Best scores are kept separately per hint mode and level, so a record earned with Direction is not mixed with one earned with Temperature, and the BEST figure changes when you change either setting. A record set with Steps at level 1 is not the same achievement as one set with Temperature at level 9.

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