How to play Coil Arena

Coil Arena is a snake game played in an open arena instead of on a grid. You and fourteen computer-controlled snakes roam a large circular arena scattered with glowing orbs. Everyone grows by eating, and everyone can be knocked out.

Moving

Your snake never stops. It always heads toward your pointer, turning smoothly rather than snapping, and the longer and heavier it gets the wider it turns. On a keyboard the left and right arrows turn it too. On a touch screen it heads toward the point you are touching.

Eating and growing

The arena is full of small orbs, and new ones keep appearing. Each one you swallow makes you longer and, over time, thicker. Larger orbs are worth more, and the largest of all are the ones a snake leaves behind when it is knocked out: most of its length is scattered along where its body was, which is why a knockout always starts a scramble.

The one rule

If a snake's head touches any part of another snake's body, that snake is out. It does not matter how big either snake is: a tiny snake can knock out a giant if the giant runs its head into the tiny snake's body. Your own body can never hurt you, so you can coil as tightly as you like. Running into the red wall at the edge of the arena also ends a run.

That single rule is the whole game. The classic move is the cut-off: race alongside a rival, pull ahead, and turn across its path so its head meets your body. A long snake can do something even better and coil completely around a smaller one, then tighten the circle until it has nowhere left to go.

Boosting

Holding boost doubles your speed. It costs length while you hold it, and what you lose is dropped behind you as orbs that anybody can eat. Boost to win a race for food, to escape a closing coil, or to get ahead of a rival for a cut-off, then let go. A snake that is too short cannot boost at all.

The rival snakes

The computer snakes follow exactly the same rules and physics as you. Each one looks ahead along the curves it is actually able to turn, so it avoids walls and bodies the way a careful player would, but it can still be trapped or cut off. Some are bolder than others and will try to cut in front of a snake smaller than themselves. They arrive at a range of sizes, and whenever one is knocked out a new one joins a moment later.

Scoring

Your length is shown at the top of the screen with your rank among the snakes in the arena and the number of snakes you have knocked out. The leaderboard lists the five longest. When your run ends you see your final length, your kills, the best rank you reached and how long you survived; your best length is saved.