Battlesnake

Battlesnake is a competitive programming game in which each player's snake is controlled in real time by a live web server that the player deploys and that responds to the Battlesnake API. Code written by the player navigates the game board to find food, avoid other snakes, and survive as long as possible; because moves must be returned within a limited number of milliseconds, performance of the player's implementation directly affects results. Snakes can be built with any programming language, tech stack, or cloud provider, which the company positions as a way for developers to experiment with unfamiliar technologies.

The platform is free to play and includes automated leaderboards, tournaments, and competitions, plus a points and customization system in which players earn points through games, tournaments, and rewards and spend them to unlock snake head and tail designs. The game engine is open source, and players can inspect it or build custom maps. Documentation covers a quickstart, API reference, and starter project templates maintained by core team members for Python, Go, Rust, TypeScript, and JavaScript, alongside a larger set of community-contributed starter projects spanning languages and platforms such as C#, Dart, F#, Haskell, Java, Kotlin, PHP, PowerShell, Ruby, Scala, Swift, Elixir, C++, Julia, Node-RED, and reinforcement-learning templates on cloud services. Accounts can be created with email or GitHub, and community support runs through Discord and GitHub Discussions.