Snake Merge

Rivals pay better than fruit

A rival that runs its head into your body is worth 60 points on the spot. That's the same as eating 60 cherries, and it should shape how you play. Fruit still matters, because every point of fruit also adds a segment to your length. But it's spread thin, often only ten or so pieces on screen at once. Cherries, apples, oranges, and strawberries are worth 1. Grapes, bananas, and kiwis are worth 2. The watermelon is worth 3, and it's the only fruit that earns a real detour.

A crashed snake also bursts into fruit: one piece for every two segments of its length, up to 30 pieces. A typical rival leaves about 18 pieces, roughly 30 points for whoever gets there first. Rivals crash into each other a lot. Those wrecks pay no bonus, but the fruit is up for grabs. The minimap in the top-right corner shows you as a white dot and rivals as orange dots. It covers an area a bit more than twice as wide as your screen. When two orange dots close in on each other, head that way.

Steering is about direction, not distance

Your snake never changes speed on its own. The head just turns toward your pointer, and swinging through a full circle takes about 1.4 seconds at any length. How far the pointer sits from the middle of the screen makes no difference, so pushing it to the edge won't make you faster.

That explains the classic beginner spin. The camera trails a little behind your head, so a pointer resting dead center actually sits just behind you. The snake then chases its own tail in a tight loop. Keep the pointer well out from the middle and your lines stay clean.

Growing never slows your turns, but it does make you wider. Your snake ends up about one and a half times as thick as when you started, and it stops getting wider at 144 segments. Width lets you scoop fruit from a broader path. It also means your head counts as touching a body from farther away, so a big snake needs a wider gap to slip through.

What boost really costs

Hold the mouse button or Space and you move about 75 percent faster. On a touchscreen, one finger steers and a second finger held down anywhere boosts. Boost burns 2.2 segments a second. Each lost segment drops behind you as a small cherry worth 1 point. You can't eat your own crumbs, so circling back for them is wasted time, but any rival on your tail can.

Two details matter more than they look. First, boost can't shrink you below 8 segments. You start with 12, so a fresh snake gets a little under two seconds of boost before it cuts out. Second, boost costs length, not score, and your score never drops. The real price is a shorter body to trap rivals with, plus a wider turn. The head turns at the same rate while covering more ground, so your turning circle grows by that same 75 percent. Boost on straight lines and let go before you need to turn.

The cut from the left

There are no walls in this arena, and crossing over your own body is safe. Unlike classic Snake, the only thing that can end a run is another snake's body, and that rule works for you too. Rivals are simple. They chase the nearest fruit and only check a short way straight ahead for bodies. When they see one, they always swerve to their own left. Heads don't count as bodies either. The deadly part starts about three segments behind any head, so a nose-to-nose bump is harmless until one head keeps going into the other snake's body.

That fixed left swerve is the trick. Pull alongside a rival on its left side and boost until your head is a couple of head-widths past its nose. Then turn across its path toward its right, still boosting. Its dodge sends it left, straight into the body you just laid down. The same move from its right side is much less reliable, because the dodge carries it off along your body instead. Turning in while you're only level with its head, without boost, usually ends the other way: your head meets its body first. If cutting rivals off is your favorite part, Tron is built around boxing in an opponent.