The snake game on old phones was a solo affair: eat, grow, avoid your own tail. Snake Game Jim puts twenty of you in the same arena at once, and the tail you have to worry about is somebody else's.

You steer with one thumb, eat to grow, and eliminate other players by making them run into you. When a snake dies it drops everything it was carrying, so the biggest gains in the game come from a kill rather than from grazing.

How to play

• Drag to steer; your snake never stops moving.
• Eat pellets to grow longer.
• Cut across the path of another snake so its head hits your body, and it dies.
• Hitting somebody else's body kills you instead, so commit or turn away early.
• Collect what a dead snake drops before anybody else does.

Surviving past the first minute

New players chase pellets in a straight line and get cut off within seconds. The safer opening is to circle the outside of the arena, where there is less traffic, and build enough length to be worth something before going near the middle.

Length is a weapon and a liability. A long snake can coil around a smaller one and trap it, but it also cannot turn quickly, and most large snakes die by running into their own body while trying to squeeze through a gap that was there a moment ago.

Good to know

• Live multiplayer arenas with real players.
• Speed boost, shield and magnet power-ups.
• Skins unlocked by playing rather than paying.
• An offline practice mode for learning the controls.

Rounds are short and restarts are instant, which is a polite way of saying you will play more of these than you planned to.