2048

How to play 2048

1. Swipe in any direction — or use the arrow keys — and every tile slides as far as it can go.
2. Two tiles with the same number merge into their sum when they collide: 2 and 2 make 4, 4 and 4 make 8, and so on. Each merge adds its value to your score.
3. After every move a new tile appears — usually a 2, sometimes a 4 — so the board never stops filling.
4. Make the 2048 tile and you've won… and can keep going for 4096 and beyond. No moves left is game over.
5. One undo per slip, and the board saves itself after every move — close the tab, come back, carry on. Best score stays on your device.

A little background

2048 was built in a weekend in March 2014 by Gabriele Cirulli, a 19-year-old Italian developer riffing on the games 1024 and Threes — and it promptly ate the internet. He open-sourced it under the MIT license instead of chasing the money, which is why the game lives everywhere from calculators to consoles. This is an independent, faithful implementation of that original: same board, same colours, same 90/10 tile odds, same "just one more game" gravity.

The whole trick is patience: anchor your biggest tile in a corner, build a staircase of values toward it, and never swipe the one way that breaks the stack. Free, no ads, no account — and it works offline once loaded, which historically has been very bad news for long commutes.