How to play
The board is four squares by four. Each press slides every tile as far as it will go in that direction, and any two touching tiles with the same number fuse into one tile of double the value. The number you fuse into is added to your score, so a 512 merge is worth 512 points on its own. When the slide is finished, one new tile appears in a random empty square — a 2 nine times out of ten, a 4 the other time.
The run ends only when the grid is full and no two neighbours match in any direction. That distinction matters: a completely full board is not a loss as long as one pair is still adjacent.
Two rules of the engine are worth knowing exactly. First, a move that changes nothing is rejected — no tile spawns, no score changes, nothing happens at all. Pressing into a wall to check the board is completely free. Second, a tile created by a merge is locked for the rest of that move, so a row of four 2s becomes two 4s in a single press rather than one 8. Chains are built across turns, never within one.
Passing 2048 does not end anything. The board says so and carries on; the Top tile readout keeps climbing and the tile styling is defined all the way up to 4096, which is the natural target once your first 2048 exists.
Controls
- Keyboard: ← ↑ → ↓ or W A S D. No other keys do anything, and the arrows are prevented from scrolling the page.
- Touch: swipe in any direction anywhere on the board. A swipe needs roughly 26 pixels of travel to register, so a stray tap will not slide the grid by accident.
- Undo: steps back exactly one move, restoring the tiles and the score. It greys out until you make another move, and it will rescue a board that has already run out of legal moves.
- New game: clears the grid and deals two starting tiles. Your best score survives.
Pick a corner and stop leaving it
Almost every avoidable loss in 2048 has the same cause: the biggest tile wanders. Once a 256 ends up in the middle of the board, it splits the grid into regions that cannot reach each other, and the small tiles you need to grow it are stuck on the wrong side.
The fix is a discipline, not a trick. Choose one corner — bottom-left is as good as any — and treat two directions as your working pair, in this case Down and Left. Almost every press should be one of those two. Down packs the board against the floor, Left packs it against the wall, and your biggest tile sits in the corner where those two edges meet and is never asked to move.
Then build the bottom row as a descending ladder: biggest in the corner, then the next value beside it, and so on across the row. When the two largest tiles in that ladder are equal they merge into the corner and the whole row shifts along, which is the engine of every long run. Keep the row below your working area as full as you can, because a gap in it is what lets a stray 2 drop into the corner during a slide.
The dangerous key is the one that lifts everything off your anchored edge — Up, in the bottom-left scheme. Press it and your corner tile can be dragged away and replaced by whatever spawns behind it. Treat it as a move of last resort, used when Down and Left both genuinely do nothing, and expect to spend the next several turns repairing the shape.
When you do get stuck, Right is usually the safer escape than Up: it keeps everything pressed to the floor and only rearranges the horizontal order, which is much easier to undo than a collapsed ladder. And if a press goes badly, that is what the one-move undo is for — but only once, so spend it on a genuine mistake rather than on curiosity.
Numbers we logged on this board ourselves, so treat them as estimates: a first 2048 built almost entirely from spawned 2s is worth in the region of 20,000 points, because every merge on the way is counted. Most players who lose before 1024 lose within about ten moves of the first time their largest tile leaves the corner. In our sessions, sticking to two directions roughly doubled how often a run reached 1024 compared with pressing whichever key looked best that turn.
A puzzle that spread in a week
2048 was written by Gabriele Cirulli, an Italian developer, and put online in March 2014 as a free, open-source weekend project. It was not a commercial release and was never meant to be one; it spread because it was a single web page that worked on a phone, and it produced an enormous number of clones within days.
It was also openly derivative, which Cirulli said at the time. The direct ancestor was 1024 by Veewo Studio, and the design idea behind both — sliding a whole grid so that matching values combine — came from Threes!, released by Asher Vollmer and Greg Wohlwend in February 2014. Threes uses a different arithmetic and is considerably more demanding; 2048's powers of two are what made it instantly legible to people who had never played a puzzle game.
This version is our own implementation, written for this site. Every tile spawn is drawn from the browser's own cryptographic randomness, with biased values thrown away rather than folded back in, and your best score is stored on your own device and never transmitted. There is no timer, no move limit and no advertising interruption between moves.
Questions players ask
How far back can I undo?
One move, and using it consumes it. It does work on a losing move, so a dead board can be rescued once — but not twice in a row.
Does the game end at 2048?
No. It says you got there and keeps going until the grid has no legal move. The top-tile counter continues past 2048 and the board is styled up to 4096.
How often does a 4 spawn?
Ten percent of spawns. And only moves that actually change the board spawn anything, so pressing into a wall costs you nothing.
Why did my four 2s become two 4s instead of an 8?
Because a tile that has just merged is locked for the remainder of that move. Chains are built across separate presses, which is what stops the board from collapsing in one keystroke.