How to Play

The rules

Every move slides all tiles as far as they can go in one direction.
Two tiles with the same number that collide merge into one tile worth double.
A tile that has just merged cannot merge again in the same move.
After every move that changed something, a new 2 (or, one time in ten, a 4) appears on a free square.
Reach the 2048 tile to win — then keep going for a bigger one if you like.
The game ends when the board is full and no neighbours match.

Controls

Arrow keys or W A S D on a keyboard.
Swipe the board on a phone or tablet — any direction, from anywhere on the grid.
Undo takes back your last move. You get 3 per game.

Scoring

Every merge adds the value of the new tile to your score — merging two 64s scores 128.
Moving without merging scores nothing, so a move that achieves nothing is a wasted one.
Your best score is kept per board size, so the three sizes have their own records.

Board sizes

4×4 — the classic game. Reaching 2048 is a genuine achievement.
5×5 — more room to manoeuvre and recover from a bad move; the gentlest way in.
3×3 — brutally tight, with only nine squares. The goal drops to 512, and even that is hard.

History of 2048

2048 was written in a single weekend in March 2014 by Gabriele Cirulli, a 19-year-old Italian developer, as a way of practising JavaScript. He released it for free and put the source code online.

It was not an original idea and he never claimed it was: 2048 was built as a tribute to 1024 by Veewo Studio, which in turn borrowed from Threes! — a polished puzzle game by Asher Vollmer and Greg Wohlwend released a month earlier, whose designers had spent over a year refining the sliding-merge mechanic.

What 2048 added was the one thing the others lacked: it was free, instant and in the browser. Within a week it had millions of players, spawned hundreds of variants, and became one of the most-cloned games ever made — the rare case of a weekend project turning into a genre of its own.

Tips & Fun Facts

Strategy

Pick a corner and never leave it. Keep your biggest tile in one corner and build the row next to it in descending order.
Use only three directions. If your anchor is bottom-left, avoid pressing up — one slip can pull the big tile out of its corner.
Build a snake. Order the bottom row large-to-small, then the row above small-to-large; merges then cascade naturally.
Keep the anchor row full. A gap in it lets a small tile slide underneath your biggest one, which is how most runs fall apart.
Merge small tiles early. Stray 2s and 4s in the middle of the board are what eventually fill it up.
Slow down when the board gets busy. Most losses come from a reflex swipe made without looking.

Did you know?

Every tile is a power of two: 2048 is 2¹¹, and reaching it needs 1024 spawned tiles' worth of merging.
The theoretical maximum on a 4×4 board is 131072 (2¹⁷) — and it requires every single spawn to be a 4.
The minimum score for reaching the 2048 tile is 20480 points.
Because a new tile appears after every move, the board gains one tile per move but loses one per merge — which is why merging has to keep pace.