2048

What is 2048?

2048 is a sliding puzzle on a four by four grid. Swipe in any direction and every tile slides that way until it hits a wall or another tile. When two tiles carrying the same number collide they merge into one tile with double the value. Two 2s make a 4, two 4s make an 8, and you keep going until you either reach the 2048 tile or fill the board with no legal move left.

It was written in a single weekend in March 2014 by Gabriele Cirulli, a nineteen-year-old Italian developer, as a free clone of an existing game called Threes. He released it open source and it took over the internet within about a week, which remains one of the better arguments that a simple idea beats a polished one.

How to play

1. Swipe or use the arrow keys to slide every tile in one direction.
2. Equal tiles that collide merge and double.
3. A new 2 or 4 appears somewhere on the board after every move.
4. The game ends when the grid is full with no merges available.

The strategy that actually works

Almost everyone plays 2048 badly at first, because the instinctive approach is to merge whatever is adjacent. That fills the board with orphaned middle-sized tiles and kills the game. The winning approach is positional rather than opportunistic.

• Pick a corner and never leave it. Keep your largest tile pinned in one corner for the entire game. Everything else follows from this.
• Only use two directions where possible. If your corner is bottom-left, use down and left almost exclusively. Use right occasionally. Never use up.
• Build a descending row. Along the bottom row, aim for a chain like 512, 256, 128, 64 running away from your corner. That chain collapses in one sweep when the moment comes.
• Fill the bottom row before anything else. A full bottom row means a down swipe cannot move your big tile out of the corner, which is the mistake that loses most games.
• Think one move ahead about where the new tile lands. The board being nearly full is not the problem. The problem is being nearly full in a way that forces you to swipe up.

Is 2048 actually winnable?

Yes, and reliably so once the corner discipline clicks. Reaching 2048 needs 1,024 merges and a fair amount of patience rather than luck. Beyond that the tile ladder continues: 4096 is hard, 8192 is very hard, and 16384 is close to the practical ceiling on a four by four grid because there is barely room to hold the chain. Solvers have gone further, but not by playing the way a person does.

If you like this

Water Sort Puzzle is the same kind of quiet, no-timer logic problem, and Cat Trap rewards the same habit of thinking one move further ahead than feels necessary. Your progress here is saved in your browser, no account is needed, and it plays with arrow keys on desktop or swipes on a phone.