How to play Contrail
Contrail is a free snake game flown over real city maps: your plane leaves a growing cloud contrail behind it, and the flight ends if you cross your own trail, hit runway traffic, or fly off the map.
- Steer with arrow keys, WASD, or swipe. The plane flies forward on its own; you only choose the turns.
- Collect passengers. Fly through the pulsing beacon to score. Every pickup stretches your contrail, so the sky gets more crowded with your own vapor.
- Respect the runways. Real airports on the map launch and land traffic. Crossing paths with a plane ends your flight; a warning corridor flashes before each one moves.
- Stay on the map. The city frame is the arena. The edge is as fatal as your own trail.
- Fly all three cities. Easy, medium, and hard rotate daily; each city keeps separate best scores and a daily leaderboard.
What is Contrail?
Contrail is a modern snake adaptation. The classic rules are intact: move constantly, grow as you eat, and never touch your own tail. What changes is the board: every arena is a real city rendered from OpenStreetMap data, with actual coastlines, lakes, highways, built-up districts, and airport runways. The snake is a plane, the tail is its contrail, and the food is passengers waiting to be picked up.
The geography is not decoration. Runways launch real crossing traffic you have to dodge, and each city's shape changes how you fly: an island-dotted bay flies differently from an inland grid. Three cities rotate in daily at midnight UTC, one per difficulty, and everyone in the world flies the same three. If you grew up on the Nokia snake or the Google snake game, the muscle memory transfers; the skies do not.
Frequently asked questions
Is Contrail a snake game?
Yes. Contrail is a snake adaptation: you fly a plane that leaves a growing contrail behind it, and touching your own trail ends the flight. Instead of an abstract grid, every board is a real city map built from OpenStreetMap data.
Is Contrail free?
Yes. Contrail is free to play in your browser with no account and no download. Premium is optional and only removes ads.
How do the daily cities work?
Three new cities go live every day at midnight UTC: one easy city with a single airport, one medium city with two, and one hard city with three or more. Everyone in the world flies the same three cities each day.
What are the controls?
Arrow keys or WASD on desktop, swipe on phones and tablets. The plane flies forward on its own; you steer it toward passengers and away from runway traffic, the map edge, and your own contrail.
How is scoring calculated?
Points come from survival time, passengers collected, and near misses with traffic. Each passenger also makes your contrail longer, so high scores get progressively harder to fly.
Is there a leaderboard?
Yes. After each flight you can see your own best flights for that city and a daily leaderboard of everyone's best scores for that city today.