Snakoff
Play
Arenas and biomes
In Snakoff the arena is a place. Every day there is a new one, and everyone in the world plays the same place that day. It has a shape, a set of walls and a look, and it gets a name to match, like “The Twin Halls” or “The Geode”. Here is what makes up a day’s arena.
The shape and the walls
Every arena is the same size: a grid 15 cells wide and 27 tall, made to fill a phone screen. What changes is the shape cut out of it. There are ten: Classic, Octagon, Hourglass, Cross, Diamond, Arch, Twin rooms, Keyhole, Gears and Bays. Inside the shape, the day adds a few short inner walls.
The shape and the walls come from the date, so they are the same for every player. So are the spots where food appears, in the same order. That is what makes the daily tournament fair: when two players compare scores, they played exactly the same board.
A shape changes how you play it. Open shapes like Classic reward wide loops. Hourglass and Keyhole have narrow passages where a long snake gets stuck. Twin rooms splits the space in two. The warm-up before each run that counts is the time to learn them.
The biomes
The look of the place is its biome. Each day’s biome is picked from the date, never the same two days running. Three biomes are in the game today:
- The Hollow: a cave of dark rock and glowing crystals.
- Wildwood: forest clearings under a canopy, with fireflies and walls of logs.
- Sunken halls: old stone courts with flagstone floors and lit braziers.
The biome and the shape together give the place its name. The Hourglass shape is “The Hourglass Cavern” in the Hollow, “The Narrow Glade” in Wildwood and “The Sunken Stair” in the Sunken halls.
Seasons
Around some dates a seasonal theme sits on top of the biome. Halloween runs from 24 to 31 October, with its own tint and food. Winter covers December, with snow settling on the terrain and the walls.
Art never changes the game
Biomes and seasons are only the look. The board, the food, the speed and the controls are the same in every biome, and the colour-blind setting gives the snake and the food high-contrast colours on any of them.
Practice and Endless use the standard arenas instead of the day’s board. Practice has its own place in each biome, such as “The Practice Glade”. Endless uses the largest standard shape with no inner walls, so the only thing to dodge is yourself.