2048

Every slide pushes all tiles in one direction until each one hits the wall or another tile. When two tiles showing the same number collide they merge into a single tile of double the value, and that new value is added to your score — merging two 64s is worth 64 points. After any move that changed the board, one new tile appears in a random empty cell: a 2 nine times out of ten, a 4 the other one in ten. Reach the 2048 tile to win, then keep playing as long as you can survive for a higher score.

• The board is 4×4 and opens with two tiles already placed.
• Each move slides every tile as far as it can go, not just one square.
• Two equal tiles that meet merge into their sum, and that sum is added to your score.
• A tile created by a merge cannot merge again on the same move — a row of 2 2 2 2 becomes 4 4, never 8.
• The game ends when the board is full and no two neighbouring tiles match.

• Desktop: Arrow keys or WASD to slide the board.
• Phone & tablet: swipe up, down, left or right.

• Daily: the board is seeded from the calendar date, so every player in the world gets the same sequence of tiles and scores can be compared fairly.
• Practice: unlimited fresh boards, a new random seed every time, nothing recorded against your daily run.

• Pick one corner and keep your largest tile there. Build a descending row toward it so your biggest merges are always next to each other.
• Once you have an anchor, use only three directions. The fourth swipe is the one that lifts your big tile out of its corner and scatters the row you built.
• Keep the anchor row full. An empty cell in that row is how a stray 2 slides underneath your largest tile and splits it from the rest.
• Merge toward the anchor rather than away from it. Two 128s on opposite sides of the board are worth less than two 32s sitting side by side.
• Late in a game, count empty cells instead of watching your score. Below three or four free squares, a single unlucky 4 can end the run.

2048 was written by Gabriele Cirulli, a nineteen-year-old Italian web developer, and published on 9 March 2014. He built it over a single weekend, partly as a programming exercise, and put the code on GitHub under the MIT License — which is why a thousand variations of it exist today, including this one.

It sits at the end of a short chain of imitation, and Cirulli never pretended otherwise. He based his game on 1024 by Veewo Studio, which was itself a clone of Threes! by the studio Sirvo, released about a month earlier in February 2014. Each step simplified the idea: Threes! merges a 1 and a 2 into a 3 and then like into like, with tiles that resist you, while 1024 and then 2048 flattened it into clean powers of two that combine whenever they are equal. That was easier to grasp at a glance and, as it turned out, far easier to spread. When 2048 went viral, Cirulli declined to make money from it, on the grounds that he had not invented the idea.

Further reading: A Weekend and Four Million Visitors

2048 is the classic sliding number-merge puzzle, free to play in your browser with a fair daily board and unlimited practice. Built in-house at PlayPendium.

A free, original browser game on PlayPendium. No download, no install.

1. A Weekend and Four Million Visitors

   A nineteen-year-old built 2048 over a weekend, gave it away for free, and refused to profit from it, because he knew he had not invented the idea. The honest, tangled history of the puzzle that ate th