Snake: how it plays, odds and payouts

Snake is a cash-out game based on the classic arcade snake. There are 40 apples on the board in a fixed order, and every apple you eat raises the payout. A plain apple adds 0.05x; golden and rainbow apples multiply your take but are riskier bites. Tap Cash out (locking in the multiplier you hold) before the snake hits a wall and the round is lost.

How a round works

1. Set your bet and start. The snake begins moving and the multiplier clock runs.
2. The 40 apples are laid out when the round starts, and the golden and rainbow ones are visible straight away.
3. The base pay is 1 + 0.05 x the number of apples eaten. Each golden apple you eat multiplies the whole pay by 2 and each rainbow apple by 5, and the multiplication stays for the rest of the round.
4. Tap Cash out at any time after the first apple to take the pay of the last apple eaten.
5. If a bite ends the round, the bet is lost. If the snake eats all 40, the round pays out by itself after about 33 seconds.

The first apple arrives about 1.4 seconds in. Whether each bite is survived is fixed on our servers at the start.

The three kinds of apple

A bite holds about 95.5% of the time for a plain apple, 47.7% for a golden one and 19.1% for a rainbow one. That is the same trade as everywhere in this game: the bigger the jump, the smaller the chance of getting it.

Worked example

Suppose apple 3 is golden and apple 6 is rainbow, and the others are plain. Eating plain apples 1 and 2 pays 1.05x and then 1.10x. Apple 3 is golden: the take becomes 1.15 x 2 = 2.3x. You reach that point in 42.2% of rounds, against 88.2% for the 1.10x just before it, so surviving the golden bite had a 47.8% chance.

Plain apples 4 and 5 then lift the pay to 2.4x and 2.5x: each plain apple is now worth 0.1x, because the golden apple doubled the base. Apple 6 is rainbow: 1.30 x 2 x 5 = 13x, reached in only 7.5% of rounds. A bet of 100 coins cashed out there returns 1,300 coins. With no golden or rainbow apples at all, a full 40-apple run pays 3x, and after 10 apples the pay is just 1.5x, so the special apples are where almost all the large numbers come from.

Max win and limits

Specials multiply each other, so a board with several golden and rainbow apples can climb to the game-wide limit of 50,000x the bet and 250,000,000 coins per round. In practice that needs a run of fantastically unlikely bites. Volatility is very high for a board with many specials and low for a board of plain apples.

What matters and what does not

• Seeing the specials in advance: helps you choose a stopping point you are happy with. It does not give you an edge, because each special's risk is priced into its reward.
• Steering the snake: the path on screen is an animation of a result already fixed on the server. Your taps are not a driving skill test.
• Past rounds: a board that ended early last time says nothing about the next.

Every plan returns 97% over many rounds. For the shared idea behind all of these games, see how crash-style games work.

How it differs from other cash-out games

Popcorn hides each burst until it happens, while Snake shows its special apples ahead of time. Both sit in the same family as Crash, but Snake's pay is mostly a slow staircase of 0.05x steps.

Play with limits

Coins are virtual, have no cash value and cannot be withdrawn or exchanged for prizes. For adults (18+), for entertainment. Set a time limit before you start; see playing safely in Cashout Arcade.