Some casual games sweep you off your feet with their artful design and UI. It might be just a little too fast to feel controllable but that's all part of the fun. But a well-timed surge can hem in an opponent, get you out of a tight spot or gift you first dibs on a haul of blobs. You soon discover that ramming isn't a particularly good tactic, since your head is so vulnerable. Once you've got some food in your belly, a mouse click or keyboard press activates a turbo boost, albeit one that drains your score (and hence your size) while engaged. Cobra commanders: with each Slither.io arena featuring between 350 and 550 live players, you're never too far from the action. Pick a nickname, click play and you're off, using mouse or arrow keys to plot a course round the play area as your snake trundles endlessly forward. Partly, that's because the barrier to entry is extraordinarily low. Judging by social media updates, it can sometimes feel like everybody is playing it. Since launching in March, Slither.io has grown to be one of the casual gaming success stories of 2016. It's recycling in action: to the victor, the coils!

If your head comes into contact with another snake, you perish, leaving behind a ghostly imprint of nourishing blobs for your foes to feast on. Your expanding body is both your weapon and your shield, allowing you to loiter in your own coils if things get crowded. Danger is all around as you curve round the arena. It's Snake reimagined on a massive, multiplayer scale, a squidgier, more populous cousin to Tron's vivid lightcycle deathmatches. It's just that there are four or five hundred other players trying to do the same thing.

In Slither.io, you are still tasked with chugging around the screen eating blobs to grow your snake from slim adder to bonzer anaconda. Now there's a free globalised upgrade for desktop, iOS and Android that smooths off some of Snake's traditional right-angle corners and sticks a pair of Cookie Monster googly eyes on it.

A killer app before smartphones were even a thing, the game transformed blocky Nokia handsets into persuasive handheld gaming devices. With apologies to Kojima, the original Snake was pretty solid.

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