The first thirty seconds are a lie
Three segments, an empty grid, plenty of room. Then you are at fifteen and the board has quietly filled with your own tail, and every turn is a commitment you made four moves ago.
It moves smoothly between cells here rather than jumping, so you can see the turn happening. It also gets faster with every dot, in increments small enough that you never notice until you miss one.
How runs actually end
Rarely the wall. Almost always the tail, and almost always in a corner you entered without an exit planned. The trick everyone eventually works out is to hug the edges and leave the middle open, then spiral in only when you have to.
Controls
Click the board first so it takes keys, then arrows or WASD. Space pauses. The pad above works on a touchscreen, and it is honestly easier than swiping.
Snake is decades older than search, arriving on arcade cabinets in the mid seventies and reaching everyone else on phones twenty years later. It turns up as google snake, google snake game or google games snake, all pointing at the same grid.
The other grid people lose an afternoon to is the maze in google pac-man, which punishes exactly the same mistake in a different shape. And the one people play without thinking about it is the dinosaur game, which needs no connection at all.
