the growordie blog

Guides, strategy and engineering notes from the team behind the multiplayer snake game with no food — where surviving is the score.

• the game growordie: the multiplayer snake game where surviving IS the score

  No food, no grind. You grow 9 cm every second just by staying alive, everything you touch kills you, and kills transfer 40% of the victim's size. The full rules of growordie and why we deleted the pellet.

• strategy How to grow past 20 meters: a growordie strategy guide

  Most players die under 8 meters playing slither.io habits. How proximity heat, boost economics, the 40% kill trade and the shrinking wall actually work — and how to exploit each one.

• compare Games like slither.io in 2026 (and the one that removed the food)

  An honest comparison of slither.io, agar.io and wormate.io ten years into the io era — what still holds up, what aged, and where growordie fits. Biases declared.

• history From Nokia Snake to massive multiplayer: 45+ years of snake games

  Blockade in 1976 had no food either. How one rule survived arcade cabinets, a billion Nokia phones and the io boom — and why the genre advances by subtraction.

• engineering 1,000 players per CPU core: the architecture of a browser MMO

  Authoritative 30Hz simulation, 11-byte binary snapshots, an incremental O(1) spatial hash and viewport AOI — the measured numbers behind growordie's server, on vanilla Node.js.

• game design The breathing arena: designing an io game where absence is punished

  Our first prototype's dominant strategy was hiding. The design story of proximity heat, the population-scaled arena, the 40% bounty, the kill cam and the deliberately boring bots.