Agar.io game modes, explained
Updated July 2026
Every agar game is the same loop: eat pellets, eat smaller cells, avoid bigger ones, split to hunt and merge back to stay safe. A game mode is a bet on which part of that loop is the fun part. Official agar.io ships five takes on it; private servers exist largely because five was never enough.
This page covers both halves: what the official modes actually are, and the mode families you will only find on private servers, with a live server linked for each one so you can try it instead of reading about it.
The five official agar.io modes
These are the modes on agar.io itself, unchanged for years.
FFA (Free For All)
The default and still the most played mode. Everyone against everyone on one big board, leaderboard at the top right, and the run ends when someone bigger finds you.
Battle Royale
Last cell standing. A shrinking safe zone forces cells together until only one player is left, which turns the endless FFA loop into rounds with an actual winner.
Teams
Three fixed teams (red, green, blue) share the board. You cannot eat teammates, so the mode is about coordinated pushes rather than lone survival.
Experimental
The FFA testbed. Mother cells spawn pellets, viruses can be pushed by feeding them, and mechanics rotate as the developers try things out.
Party
FFA with a shareable room code so friends land in the same arena. The code is also the closest official agar.io gets to a private server.
Free-for-all variants on private servers
Private servers keep the FFA shape and change the physics. These four run around the clock on alis.io, one click, no account:
Straight agar rules with standard merge times and virus behavior. The baseline everything else on this page is a variation of.
Cells recombine the moment they touch instead of waiting out a merge timer. Splitting stops being a commitment, so play turns into constant split-and-reform aggression with up to 64 cells.
Ejecting gains more mass than it costs, merge is instant and mass never decays. Feeding your own cells, a losing move everywhere else, becomes the whole economy, and the fastest self-feeders win.
The cell cap raised from 16 to 250 with standard merge rules. One player can flood a whole region of the map, then has to survive long enough to pull the pieces back together.
Objective modes: win conditions beyond the leaderboard
The second private-server family replaces "get big" with an actual objective:
Two teams, queues with ready checks, and a score to win. The agar loop as a round-based team game instead of an endless board.
Teams fight over control points instead of raw mass. Holding ground beats being huge.
A vertical climb: split your way up a seeded tower against the clock, with a new tower daily, leaderboards and 1v1 duel links. Same physics, entirely different game.
A survivors-style roguelike built on agar physics: waves of enemies, an arsenal of mutations, and runs that end in a boss instead of a leaderboard.
The mode nobody has made yet
Every mode above started as someone changing one rule. On alis.io the ruleset is editable in a visual gamemode editor: tweak physics, draw a map, publish, and your mode gets its own hosted server and page like the ones linked above. The community browser is where player-made modes live.
Common questions
- What game modes does agar.io have?
- Official agar.io has five modes: FFA, Battle Royale, Teams, Experimental and Party. Everything else, from instant merge to self feed to team deathmatch, lives on private servers.
- What is the most popular agar.io game mode?
- FFA, by a wide margin, both on agar.io and on private servers. Most private-server modes are FFA with one rule changed, which is exactly why they work: the loop stays familiar.
- What game modes do agar.io private servers add?
- Two big families. Physics variants keep FFA and change the rules: instant merge, self feed, crazy split caps. Objective modes change the goal: team deathmatch, domination, timed climbs, survivors-style runs.
- Can I make my own agar.io game mode?
- Not on agar.io itself. On alis.io you can build a mode and map in the browser editor and publish it to its own free hosted server, no coding involved.