Almost every game asks you to build something. This one asks you to keep a very small room from filling with furniture. Sixteen cells, a new tile after every move, and one rule for getting rid of anything: two matching numbers, pushed into each other, leave as one. Tidying is the only exit, and tidying is never quite fast enough.

That is the whole joke of it, and it is why the thing is so hard to put down. There is no timer, no enemy and no random punishment — every board you lose, you built yourself, one apparently sensible move at a time. You can always see exactly where it went wrong, and you are always sure you would not do it again.

Where it comes from

2048 was written over a single weekend in March 2014 by Gabriele Cirulli, an Italian developer who was nineteen at the time and made it, by his own account, mostly to see whether he could. He put the source out under an open licence and went to bed. Within a fortnight it was everywhere.

He was open about the lineage: his version was a reworking of a game called 1024, which was itself chasing Threes!, the beautifully fussy puzzle Asher Vollmer and Greg Wohlwend had released a month earlier. Threes is the more elegant design and 2048 is the one the world played, which happens more often than designers like. What Cirulli's version added was legibility — powers of two, a colour that climbs with the number, and a board you can read in a half-second on a bus.

What this version does with it

We have kept the rules exactly as they were and spent the effort on the things around them. The board is set in warm charcoal and firelight rather than the original beige, with tiles that climb from bone through orange into gold, so the state of a board reads as heat before you have read a single digit. Tiles slide and land with real motion rather than snapping between positions, which matters more than it sounds: you can see what a move actually did.

There is an undo, which purists will dislike and which we have kept anyway. One careless swipe after a long careful run is a miserable way to end forty minutes, and the button is right there next to the score if you want it. Reaching 2048 is announced and then ignored — the board carries on, live, with your score intact, because most people who get there are already thinking about 4096.

Thirty seconds to start

• Swipe in any direction, anywhere on the screen. Arrow keys and WASD do the same job on a laptop.
• Every tile moves every time. There is no such thing as nudging one corner.
• Z takes back the move you regret. N starts over.

The habit worth building

Beginners swipe in all four directions and wonder why their big tile keeps wandering. Good players pick an edge, keep their largest number welded to it, and use two directions almost exclusively — the third only when forced, the fourth almost never. Everything else in the strategy follows from that one discipline, and the guide below walks through why.

Read the full 2048 guide  →

↑ Back to the game