How to play 2048
Every move slides all the tiles on the board as far as they can go in one direction. Two tiles with the same number that run into each other merge into one tile worth their sum: two 2s make a 4, two 4s make an 8, and so on. After each move that changes the board, a new tile appears in a random empty cell: a 2 nine times out of ten, otherwise a 4. Make a tile of 2048 to win. The game is over when the board is full and no two neighbouring tiles match.
- Keyboard: the arrow keys or W, A, S, D. U takes back a move.
- Phone or tablet: swipe on the board. The page doesn't scroll while your finger is on the board.
- Controller: the d-pad or the left stick; the bottom face button presses the first button on the win and game-over screens. To check that a pad's d-pad registers every press, try the controller tester.
A merged tile can't merge again in the same move, so a row of 2, 2, 2, 2 moved left becomes 4, 4 rather than 8, and a row of 4, 4, 8 becomes 8, 8. When three equal tiles line up, the two nearest the wall you're moving towards merge. These are the rules of the original game Gabriele Cirulli published in March 2014.
Undo, saving and board sizes
You get three undos per game; the counter on the Undo button shows how many are left. Undo also works on the move that ended the game. The tile that appeared after a move comes back when you undo it, so you can't reroll a bad spawn by undoing and repeating the same move.
Your game is saved in this browser after every move, so a reload or a closed tab carries on where you left off. Each board size (3×3, 4×4, 5×5 and 6×6) keeps its own game, best score, best tile, number of games and wins, and you can switch between them without losing anything. On 3×3 the goal is 512, because 1024 is the biggest tile nine cells can ever hold; on the other boards it is 2048. After the win screen you can keep going.
Strategy: the corner method
Most high scores come from one simple habit: keep your biggest tile in a corner and build towards it.
- Pick a corner, say bottom left, and get your biggest tile there early.
- Use mostly two directions (left and down), a third when you have to (right), and the fourth (up) only when nothing else moves. Pressing up pulls the corner tile out, and a 2 drops into the gap.
- Keep the bottom row full and in order, biggest in the corner, so a sideways move can't shift it.
- Snake the order: when the bottom row is full, continue on the row above, going the other way, so each tile sits next to the one it will merge into.
- Merge small tiles early, before they get trapped behind big ones. A 2 stuck between a 256 and a 512 is how most games end.
- Think one spawn ahead: before a move, look at which cells it leaves empty, because a new tile will land in one of them.
The corner method is what makes 2048 reachable at all on 4×4. Beyond that, 4096 and 8192 take the same method and a lot of patience: every doubling needs roughly twice as many moves as the one before.
How the score works
Each merge adds the value of the new tile to your score. Building a tile of 2k from 2s scores (k − 1) × 2k points in all, so a 2048 tile made only of 2s is worth 20,480 points, and every 4 that spawned along the way lowers that a little, because a new 4 skipped the merge of two 2s. The tiles on the board always add up to the tiles that spawned, 2.2 per move on average, so a board holding a 2048 tile has taken at least 510 moves, and about 930 on average.
Share your best game
Once you've scored, Share result makes a link to your board, your score and your number of moves. Whoever opens it sees your final board and can start their own game. The link carries only the numbers on the board; the page checks that the score and moves add up before it shows them. For another quick game against the clock, test your reflexes with the reaction time test, or let the dice roller settle who plays next.