How to play Mahjong Snake

Mahjong Snake is the classic snake game rebuilt with mahjong tiles. Steer a snake made of tiles around the board, swallow every tile it meets, and catch the fleeting golden tile for a big bonus.

Steps

1. The snake crawls forward on its own. Steer it with the arrow keys, WASD, or by swiping.
2. Swallow the tile in your path to score ten points and grow one tile longer.
3. Now and then a golden-framed tile appears. It is worth forty points, but it only stays on the board for six seconds.
4. Hitting the wall or your own tail ends the run — and the snake speeds up every three tiles, so late runs are tight.
5. Press Space, or the Pause button, whenever you need a breath. Your best score is saved in your browser.

Tips that actually help

• Turn early. Late turns near a wall are how most runs end.
• Curl along the edges to keep the middle open — a long snake needs room to loop.
• Chase the golden tile only when your tail is short or the path to it is a straight line.
• The pace rises every three tiles. Around tile twelve, start planning two moves ahead.
• Quick double taps register as a queue, so you can bank the next turn while the snake is still crawling.

What is Mahjong Snake?

Mahjong Snake takes the oldest arcade skeleton there is — the snake that grows one segment per bite — and dresses it in mahjong tiles. Your snake is a chain of real tile backs, its head is a tile face, and the food it chases is drawn from the same forty-two faces used everywhere else on this site.

How a run works

The snake crawls forward on its own; you only steer. Each tile swallowed is worth ten points and adds one segment, which makes every later turn wider and every gap tighter. The board is a fourteen-by-eleven grid with no wrap-around: the wall is a wall. Hitting it, or running into your own tail, ends the run and shows your score on the spot.

Steering works three ways. Arrow keys or WASD on a keyboard, a swipe anywhere on the board on a phone, and — this is the part experienced snake players look for — inputs are queued two deep, so a quick up-then-left registers as a proper corner instead of being swallowed mid-tick.

The golden tile

Now and then a tile appears with a golden frame and a soft glow. It is worth forty points instead of ten, and it stays on the board for exactly six seconds before it moves elsewhere. That short window is the whole point: the golden tile is the reason a careful run suddenly becomes a decision. Take it through open ground and you bank a big bonus; chase it across your own body and you may never get there.

Speed is the real difficulty

Every third tile the snake accelerates slightly, from a relaxed crawl toward a pace that demands planning two moves ahead. The speed-up is deliberately gentle — no sudden spikes — but it compounds. By the time you have swallowed a dozen tiles, the board plays a different game than it did at the start, and the edge lanes you were ignoring become load-bearing walls.

Why the head wears a face

One small mahjong touch on the arcade skeleton: the snake's head always shows the last tile it swallowed. Eat a five of circles and the head becomes the five of circles. It changes nothing about the rules, but it makes the snake feel like it is made of the game it is eating — which, on this site, it is.

Fair play, local scores

There is no sign-up and nothing leaves your browser. Your best score is stored locally on your device, and every deal of tiles is drawn with the same procedural renderer as the rest of the site — no images, no downloads.