Coil

Arcade · plays in your browser, no download

Where it comes from

The snake arena, which took over phones and browsers after slither.io in 2016 and has been remade a thousand times since. The shape is older than that: it is Snake from a Nokia, with the walls replaced by other players — and the moment you add other players, the game stops being about where you go and starts being about where you leave your body.

How to play

You are the green snake. Drag anywhere and your head turns towards your finger. On a keyboard, the left and right arrows.
Eat the glowing pellets to grow. The bar at the bottom says how many rings this round wants — more stars, more rings.
A head that touches a body dies — yours or theirs. Bodies touching bodies is nothing at all.
So you never win a chase. You win by putting your side in front of a muzzle: they run into you, and what was their body becomes food.
The number over each snake is how long it is. It tells you who you can take on and who you cannot.
A round lasts ninety seconds. When the buzzer goes, the longest snake still standing wins it.
The rim stops you, it does not kill you — you slide along it. The danger here is only ever another snake.

What makes this one different

You are a snake that never stops, in a ring full of other snakes. Eat to grow longer. One rule decides everything: a head that touches a body dies, a body that touches a body does not. So you never win by chasing — you win by putting your own side in front of somebody else’s nose, and what was their body is left on the ground for you to eat.

Nothing in the ring lasts for ever: a round runs ninety seconds and then the longest snake still standing takes it. That is deliberate. Without a clock, two long snakes circling each other in a ring full of food never finish, and nobody watching can tell whether they are winning or stuck. Every round ends, and every target can be reached by eating alone: the prova measures both.

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