slither.io is a very addictive new game just released at the beginning of April. It’s an MMO version of the classical game “snake”. It added an interesting rule that if you get other snakes to run into you, then they will explode and you can eat their remains and become longer/bigger. So that creates playful competition between players — at the origin of map, players can grow faster (by eating a lot of newly-spawned snakes) but it’s also easier to run into other snakes and die. In the desktop browser version, you can even change your skin.
From the UX side, it’s easy to play slither.io by mouse — just move your cursor and your snake will follow it (click to speed up). The mobile version is a little harder — you have to tap and control it’s direction (double tap with a longer second tap, to speed up). Playing by keyboard is even harder to control — the left and right key controls the direction — but from the snake’s view — if you long press the left/right key, your snake will turn 360˚.
A tiny twist from the original “snake” game is that you don’t die if you hit yourself — this allows for a strategy where you can surround/trap a smaller snake who has no choice but to bump to your body and die.
Here’s some screenshots about the journey of a hungry red snake and a poor victimized blue snake:
