Snake VS Block beginner's tips - How to get the most points

At first glance, Snake VS Block looks like yet another variation on the BBTAN / Ballz craze that has been sweeping the mobile nation. However, despite its colourful numbered blocks and stream of ever-expanding dots, it plays quite differently to its inspirations.

Instead of feeling like a mix of Arkanoid and a bubble shooter, Snake VS Block is more reminiscent of an endless runner with its fast-paced lane-switching and constant forward momentum.

If your Ballz skills aren't translating and you find yourself hitting a wall (literally), our Snake VS Block tips should help you adjust and break through to a new high score.

The first step to earning a better score is knowing what's actually giving you points.

Although you'll pick up stacks of balls and make progress down the endless corridor, the only way to earn points is by running into the stationary, coloured blocks with numbers on them.

The distance you travel or number of balls you pick up do not directly impact your score: only the balls that you spend running into blocks will add to your total.

You don't have to break a block entirely to receive points, either. Every time you run into a block, you spend a ball and reduce its counter by one, which in turn awards you a point.

If you have enough balls and run into a block enough times, you will reduce its counter to zero and it will disappear.

But if you, say, hit a block with a "30" on it twice before sliding in another direction, its number would change to "28" and you would receive two points. If you ran into that same "30" block until it disappeared, you would earn 30 points.

As your dot-snake slithers ever-onward, you'll come across yellow dots with numbers above them. Running over these adds them to your total, represented by the number above your lead dot and the amount that make up your snake’s body.

The more dots you have, the more blocks you can run into and the more points you can earn. Although you only receive points by running into the numbered blocks, you can only survive hitting those blocks by having enough acquired dots.

While hitting higher-numbered blocks will reward you with more points overall, you still want to focus on breaking through lower-numbered blocks to make progress.

You always want to have plenty of balls in reserve in case you get trapped behind a high-numbered block, and the best way to reserve balls is by aiming for the lowest number when a wall of blocks impedes your path.

Given a choice between hitting a "2" block, "6" block, or "20" block, aim for the "2" every time.

If you don't have time to read the numbers on each block, use their colours to guide you. The lowest numbered blocks are blue, followed by green, then yellow, orange, and red.

You want to try to hit blue and green blocks whenever possible. If you get stuck behind a red, it will almost always result in a game over unless you've hoarded dozens of balls by that point.

Your dot-snake cannot move backwards and you don’t control his forward momentum: you can only swerve him left or right. However, you can swerve left or right at any time, even after you've run into a block and are trapped against it.

Use this freedom to slide away from high-numbered blocks you've accidentally run into or to snag sets of balls that are right next to one another.

Pay careful attention when breaking blocks - you don't want to get trapped between two of them. If you run into the corner of a block that is right next to another, your snake might bounce between the two, alternating taking points from each but spending balls twice as quickly.

If you're just trying to get through a wall of blocks, you only need to break one block to progress, and wasting balls on two blocks is unnecessary.

It's not always obvious this is happening unless you notice that two blocks' numbers are counting down as opposed to just one.