12 Games Like Google Snake You Can Play For Free Right Now

When we talk about gaming, it's often the big-budget, graphically-intensive experiences that get all the attention. As attention-grabbing as space epics like "Starfield" are, though, there's a lot more to gaming than the triple-A behemoths of this world.

Casual games are just as — if not more — important, as they make up a huge chunk of the gaming market that's constantly growing, with the segment expected to be worth more than $25 billion by 2029. We're not here to dissect the reasons for this popularity, but it's worth mentioning that the best casual games are often very pick-up-and-play experiences that are easy to get into and don't demand too much from players. They may not offer the depth of a big-budget RPG, but they can be great ways to occupy small chunks of time.

There are many sources you can turn to for a quick gaming pick-me-up, but one of our favorites is the humble Google Doodle. First started in 1998, Google released its first gaming Doodle in 2010 and has since published many casual games playable right in the browser, most of which the company has archived. Google Snake is a great example, but there are more worth checking out — here's a list of 12 that stand out.

Let's start with the one that kicked it all off – Pac-Man. Google's first interactive Doodle debuted on May 21, 2010, to celebrate Pac-Man's 30th anniversary. Google's take on the classic arcade game will be familiar to anyone who's played Pac-Man before: eat pellets, score points, and have fun, with the only major difference being a horizontal playfield with walls spelling out Google.

The Google team spent quite a bit of time making their version of Pac-Man as faithful as possible. The ghosts behave identically to their arcade counterparts, all the sounds and sound effects are spot-on, and the team even replicated bugs present in the 30-year-old original. The result is a browser-based game that might seem simple at a glance but has a surprising amount of depth — precisely what you'd expect from a recreation of Toru Iwatani's original.

Google's version of Pac-Man is also two-player ready. If you insert another coin when the game's underway, the game resets with Ms. Pac-Man entering the fray. A second player can then take control of Ms. Pac-Man using the WASD keys for some co-op fun. The particularly dexterous amongst you can also use this feature to control two characters at once. We tried that and failed miserably, but we're sure some of you will find it well within your abilities.

The Rubik's Cube isn't the only real-life game that Google has recreated in digital form — although this one is, admittedly, probably better known for its digital version.

Yes, Google has its own take on the immortal card game Solitaire that's probably best remembered by generations of PC and Windows users as one of the games bundled with Microsoft's OS. Google's version of solitaire can't claim the same longevity as Microsoft's version, which debuted more than 30 years ago and is still available on the Microsoft Store and through Microsoft Teams, but it's otherwise the same solitaire many of us know and love.

Unlike most of the other games on this list, solitaire wasn't technically a Doodle. Instead, Google added it to the search engine in 2016, and it's accessible simply by typing "solitaire" into the Google search bar. Gameplay-wise, Google's solitaire plays much the same as Microsoft's take down to the two difficulty choices determining how many cards are drawn from the deck each time you click on it. 

Sadly, it doesn't have the classic victory animation of Microsoft's version, but it's still a great way to kill some time on a slow day.

Sticking with card games for a moment, let's turn to Lotería, a Doodle that the company released at the end of 2019. Lotería is a traditional Mexican card game similar to bingo, where players try to match a four-bean pattern with the cards they have. However, that only tells half the story — unlike bingo, which uses numbers, Lotería uses vividly designed cards, many of which offer an insight into the Mexican experience.

Google's version of Lotería is faithful to this experience, with a selection of eye-catching cards and a genuinely enjoyable and riotously colorful aesthetic that's really fun even for those with little to no connection with Mexican culture. The game plays like its real-life counterpart, showing you the pattern it wants and then requiring you to drag virtual beans over virtual cards to try and match the pattern demanded, all at a pretty fast pace.

The only downside, perhaps, is that Lotería is a multiplayer game without single-player support. Thankfully, the game lets you create private lobbies to play with your friends, so you can still get some bingo-style fun going without needing to find a public match — which, as you might expect, is quite hard now.

Garden gnomes likely aren't the most obvious subjects for a game, even the sort of casual experience that Google specializes in with its interactive Doodles. Yet that's what we have here in the form of the Celebrating Garden Gnomes Doodle. It's not just notable for being a game based on garden gnomes, mind you, as this is also genuinely one of the best Google Doodle games the company has ever made.

As with many of Google's best offerings, its garden gnome game has a basic premise — shoot garden gnomes out of a trebuchet and see how far you can get, planting flowers as you go. However, it's elevated significantly by all the little details you'll discover as you spend time with it. A great example is the gnomes themselves, whose different shapes alter how they bounce. Each gnome plays slightly differently from the other, and you'll quickly find the ones that suit you best.

That's not all — the garden also has a variety of objects that can help you in your quest to plant as many flowers as possible. Mushrooms and logs, for example, push you upward and forward, respectively, while hitting the clouds keeps your gnome airborne, allowing you to cover great distances. Finally, pressing the spacebar key brings your gnome crashing down to the ground. This may not seem all that useful, but timing it right and bringing it down just before a log or mushroom is a great way to send your gnome flying even further. It's quite satisfying and a lot of fun.

Google's best Doodle games manage to be fun while celebrating valued aspects of our shared human culture. The games based around Lotería and garden gnomes are two great examples, and another one that's worthy of adding to the list is a recent 2023 Doodle game celebrating one of South Asia's many great contributions to the world of food — pani puri.

For those not in the know, pani puri (also known by various other names such as gol gappe and pakodi) is crispy, hollow dough shells filled with all sorts of stuffings, ranging from simple fare such as potatoes and chickpeas to full-on curries. It's that variety that forms the basis of Google's Pani Puri Doodle, which is the company's interpretation of tile-matching games like "Candy Crush."

You're not just chasing the big tile combos here, though. Instead, you'll have to match the fillings and quantities that customers ask for with the pani puri on screen, adding an extra layer to the gameplay. It's not an overly challenging game, even in its timed mode, especially as you'll often receive orders that conveniently match any huge matched sets of pani puri you have in the grid. That's a small quibble, however, this Doodle's a great way to clear your mind with a quick bout of tile matching in between other tasks — all while building up a bit of an appetite.

Real-world sports aren't always the easiest to distill into casual, browser-based games, but Google's take on baseball for its Fourth of July 2019 Doodle is a great example of nailing the essence of a sport without getting bogged down in the details of its real-world equivalent.

Released for the 2019 Fourth of July celebration, Google's version of baseball is a simple but surprisingly engrossing affair where you play as the batting team and try to score as many runs as possible. It's not a complex simulation of baseball, and there's very little in the way of in-depth mechanics, but it's genuinely addictive despite — or because of — that. Aided, undoubtedly, by the cute food-themed player designs the game serves up.

It's really a timing game at its heart. Learn to click the screen at the right time for each of the pitches you face, and you'll be well on your way to scoring home run after home run. That's easier said than done, though, as it'll take quite a while before you can get good enough to nail the timing every time. The game also shows the distance for each home run, so there's some fun to be had in trying to hit longer and longer home runs. It's not something that you're rewarded for in-game, but it's a nice extra personal challenge you can set for yourself.

Google's fun take on baseball wasn't the company's first attempt at simplifying a much-loved American sport. For that, we have to turn the clock back seven years to 2012. That year, at the height of the Summer Olympics in London, Google released a basketball Doodle that, despite its simplicity, is still quite fun even more than a decade on.

Like the Fourth of July 2019 baseball Doodle, Google's Basketball 2012 Doodle isn't a recreation of the full team-based game. Instead, it pits you against the clock, challenging you to score as many points as possible in 24 seconds. A conveyor belt serves up a steady stream of balls, and it's up to you to nail your throws. Shooting is a two-step process, with the first press of the spacebar picking the ball up and charging the shot, and another press releasing and throwing the ball.

The game is once again a timing exercise, where you charge up and release a shot without over or under shooting the net. To add to the challenge, the player moves back after you've shot a certain number of balls, adding to the challenge towards the end. It's admittedly quite one-dimensional, but that doesn't mean it's not enjoyable. Besides, there's a decent amount of challenge involved in learning how to nail the shots, especially given the added pressure of the 24-second clock. Google's basketball Doodle isn't an all-time classic, perhaps, but it's great for quick bursts of fun, nonetheless.

Let's switch gears and check out one of Google's spookier Doodles. For Halloween 2016, the Doodle team released this fun little game featuring Momo, a black cat and freshman student at a school of magic, who needs to save the day by defeating ghosts and saving their friends.

Google's Halloween 2016 Doodle finds that same balance between simplicity and fun that all its best Doodles achieve. There's nothing too complex to this Doodle, with the main gameplay mechanic requiring you to defeat ghosts by drawing the symbols over their heads on screen. It starts out easy, but the challenge level increases quickly, with more complex symbol chains and multiple enemies testing your precision and ability to prioritize enemies. At the end of each of the five stages, you'll have to fight boss ghosts, adding a bit of extra spice with their multi-stage symbol chains and gimmicks.

The basic premise is enjoyable enough, but add the time pressure of ghosts moving toward your player character and the appeal of trying to nail down big combos for maximum points, and you get one of the better games that Google's published thus far.

Mail-based communications have had a long and storied history, with early highlights including the Pony Express of 1860 and arguably culminating in the convenience of email services like Google's now-ubiquitous Gmail of the present day. Google decided to celebrate precisely this in 2015, releasing a Pony Express Doodle game in conjunction with the 155th anniversary of the Pony Express' founding.

The Pony Express was a short-lived service that delivered mail on horseback, linking St. Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento, California before continuing on to San Francisco. It connected the Eastern and Western United States in the days before there was a transcontinental telegraph system, cutting mail delivery times down to 10 days thanks to a system of relays that allowed the mail to stay on the move, with around 80 riders employed by the service. Google's Pony Express Doodle puts you in the shoes of these men in an arcade-style reimagining of the 1860s mail delivery experience.

You're tasked with controlling the horse's vertical position on the play field, switching between five lanes to pick up mail and avoid obstacles. Emulating the real-life Pony Express, the game has a few checkpoints along the way, recreating the relays where the real-life Pony Express riders would have stopped to refuel and hand their mail off to another rider. The goal, as ever in these item-collecting arcade games, is to get to the end with as much mail as possible — with the fun being in replaying the game until you manage to nail a perfect (or near-perfect) run.

Going toe-to-toe with solitaire and Pac-Man in the nostalgia stakes is Google's version of the classic puzzler Minesweeper released in 2018. It's a mostly faithful recreation of the immortal Minesweeper, which came bundled with Microsoft Windows starting with Windows 3.1 and ending with the launch of Windows 8, although you can still get a version of it on the Microsoft Store.

Created by Microsoft employees Robert Donner and Curt Johnson and possibly drawing inspiration from a 1983 game called "Mined-Out", Minesweeper is a logic puzzle where the player has to uncover a tile-based playing field while avoiding the titular mines. Aiding the player in this process are various numbers that pop up in the process that indicate the number of mines present in the nearby tiles. Google's browser-based version is no different, although — perhaps in a nod to past controversies related to the use of mines in a casual video game — it swaps the mine-based imagery for a gardening theme.

Beyond that innocuous change, Google's Minesweeper is the familiar puzzle experience that Windows users of a certain generation will have grown up loving and possibly hating in equal measure. It's not for everyone, but give it a go anyway — there's even an easy difficulty to help you get back into the game.

Google's Doodles often celebrate various elements of popular entertainment — see, for instance, the Doodles celebrating the posthumous birthdays of Charlie Chaplin and Freddie Mercury — but few of these have been full-on games, with the company broadly sticking to territory such as sports and already-existing games for its gaming Doodles. One welcome exception, though, was the Doctor Who Doodle, which commemorated the sci-fi series' 50th anniversary in 2013.

Google's Doctor Who Doodle is an isometric puzzle-platformer, with the player controlling any of the 11 Doctors featured in the series up until then. Each level follows a similar loop — the Doctor steps out of their iconic time-travelling phone box called the TARDIS into a strange alien world, with a floating letter at the other end of the level. Your task is to collect all six letters that make up the word Google, which involves making your way through puzzles and avoiding Daleks.

The game does a lot with a little, offering enough of a challenge to suck players in without requiring the manual dexterity of a conventional platformer. The included timer is a nice touch, too, encouraging repeated playthroughs to try and collect all six letters as quickly as possible.

We end our list with likely the most ambitious Google Doodle of them all – Champion Island, released in July 2021 during the pandemic-delayed 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. Befitting the host country, Champion Island was designed in partnership with Tokyo-based Studio 4°C and sports a 16-bit RPG aesthetic that brings to mind games like the all-time classic RPG "Chrono Trigger."

It plays like one, too, with an open world that the player can navigate freely. The main goal is to compete in seven different sports, namely table tennis, skateboarding, archery, rugby, artistic swimming, climbing, and marathon running, collecting the seven scrolls each sport's champion offers when you defeat them. Like any RPG worth its salt, Champion Island also has a selection of side quests you can discover through exploration, which provide trophies that the game keeps track of in the dedicated trophy room. So it's well worth exploring off the beaten track and not just making a beeline for the main sporting minigames.

The minigames aren't too in-depth, but that's perfectly fine — it is a browser-based game, after all. So while the mechanics may not be all that special, the overall ambition and cheery classic RPG feel of Champion Island sets it apart from the rest and makes it one of the best Google Doodles ever made.