2048
Slide, merge, reach the tile.
- Difficulty Medium
- Players 1 player
- Round 5-20 min
Arrow keys or WASD to slide. Swipe on touch. U undoes, R restarts.
How to play
A 4x4 grid, sliding tiles, and one rule: equal numbers merge into their sum. Every move spawns a new tile, so the board fills up whether or not you are making progress. The goal tile is 2048. Most games end long before that, wedged into a corner with no legal move left.
Press a direction and every tile on the board slides as far as it can go that way. Tiles with the same value that collide merge into one tile with double the value, and you score the merged value. After every move, a new 2 or 4 appears in a random empty cell.
The game ends when the board is full and no two adjacent tiles can merge. Reaching the 2048 tile does not end the game; you can keep going for 4096 and beyond.
Your current score, best score and board state are kept in local storage, so closing the tab does not lose your run. Undo is limited to one step, which is enough to recover from a mis-swipe without turning the game into a puzzle you can brute-force.
Strategy that actually helps
- Pick one corner and never move away from it. Almost every 2048 strategy is really a rule about which direction you are allowed to press.
- Keep your largest tile in a corner and build a descending chain next to it. A tidy board with the big number pinned is worth more than a high score.
- Avoid pressing the direction that pulls your biggest tile out of its corner, even when it looks like the only move that merges something.
- Fill rows rather than chasing merges. A full, ordered row is a resource; a scatter of matching tiles in the middle is not.
- When the board is nearly full, pause and count. Most losses are one careless swipe, not a slow squeeze.
Questions
Is 2048 solvable every time?
No. The random tile spawns mean some boards are unwinnable, though good players reach 2048 in the large majority of games. The corner strategy is what closes most of that gap.
What is the highest possible tile?
There is no hard limit. The theoretical maximum on a 4x4 grid is 131072, which requires perfect play and has never been achieved by a human without undos.
Why did my score go up by less than I expected?
Score is the sum of merged tile values, so merging two 8s gives 16 points. Sliding tiles without merging gives nothing.
Does undo count against my score?
The score rolls back with the board, so undo restores the exact earlier state. One undo step is available per move.