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 steer by a single number — the count of moves that still separate your head from the food.

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.
Your snake moves one cell every tick and never stops.
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 just is not painted, so the only thing telling you where it went is the Steps to food readout above the screen. When you finally crash, the game outlines the cell the food was occupying — which is usually the moment you find out how badly you misread the number.

What the step counter actually means

The number is not a straight-line distance. It is the count of moves you would need to reach the food if you walked there without wasting a turn: the horizontal gap plus the vertical gap. A reading of 6 could mean the food is six cells straight ahead, or three across and three up, or any other pair that adds to six.

It shows ? until your first move. The snake always starts parked in the same place, so a free reading before the clock starts would give away too much.

How to read it while moving

The counter refreshes on every tick, and this is the part worth internalising: every single move changes it by exactly one. It can never hold steady. That makes each tick a yes-or-no answer about the direction you are currently travelling:

The number falls — you are closing in. Keep going.
The number rises — you are moving directly away on this axis. Turn.

So a straight run gives you a free measurement. Hold one direction and watch: the count drops tick after tick, then starts climbing. The tick where it turned around is the tick you crossed the food's row or column. Whatever the lowest number you saw was, that is exactly how far the food sits off the line you just walked — and you know it is behind you now, one step back.

Two more consequences worth having in your head. Because the count changes by one every move, it flips between odd and even as you go, and a reading of 1 means the food is in one of the four cells touching your head. And when the count keeps falling through a turn, both axes are closing at once, which means you are on a genuinely optimal path rather than a lucky one.

Tactics that hold up

Sweep, then commit. Run one long straight line first to find the turnaround point and learn the perpendicular offset. Guessing early costs more than measuring.
Zero one axis at a time. Line up the column, then the row. Diagonal zig-zagging burns ticks and tells you less per move.
Respect your own tail. A blind search wanders, and a wandering snake coils. The longer you are, the more a search pattern turns into a trap you built.
Hug the middle when lost. From the centre of the board every direction stays open. Searching along a wall throws away half your options.

Controls

Turn: swipe on a touchscreen, or press an arrow key or WASD on a keyboard.
Start, pause, resume, restart: tap anywhere on a touchscreen, or press the space bar on a keyboard.
Change level: tap a 1–9 button on a touchscreen, or press a number key from 1 to 9 on a keyboard.

With a mouse, the 1–9 buttons still work, but the board itself does not: the game listens for touches and key presses, so steering, starting and pausing on a desktop are the keyboard's job.

The nine speed levels

Level 1 moves the snake once a second. Level 9 is five times faster, at one move every 200 milliseconds. The tick drives the hint as well as the snake, so raising the level does not just make you steer quicker — it gives you less time to think about each new number. That is why the level is a difficulty setting for reading as much as for reflexes.

Your best score is tracked per level, so the BEST figure changes when you change levels. A record set at level 1 is not the same achievement as one set at level 9, and one shared number would make only the slowest level worth playing.

What the game remembers

Your best score per level, your chosen level, and your light or dark theme preference are kept in your own browser's local storage, and only after you accept the banner. Nothing is sent anywhere and there is no account. See the privacy policy for the specifics, or decline and play a session at a time.

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