2048

• Pick one corner and keep your largest tile there for the whole game. The bottom left is a common choice. That tile only ever leaves its corner because you sent it there, so the game becomes a matter of never sending it.
• With the corner chosen, two of the four directions pull that tile away from it — for a bottom-left corner, up and right. Lean on left and down, and treat the other two as a last resort.
• Build the row holding the corner in descending order, so the bottom reads 256, 128, 64, 32 outward from the corner. A ladder merges in a chain: the 32 doubles into the 64, which can then take the 128.
• Keep that anchor row completely full. With no gap in it, a sideways move cannot shuffle your big tile along the row, and no new tile can drop in beside it.
• Merge small tiles as soon as they appear. Stray 2s and 4s are what fill the last empty squares and end the game.
• Watch the number of empty squares, not the score. Empty squares are the only thing keeping the game alive, so when you are down to two or three, stop building and start clearing.
• Late on, take the direction that makes the most merges at once, not the one that makes the single biggest tile. Three merges free three squares; one large merge frees one.

Three different sets of keys steer this board: the arrow keys, W A S D, and H J K L. If your hand sits more comfortably in one place than on the arrow cluster, W A S D keeps everything under four fingers, and the R key starts a new game. Click or tap the board once first, so the keys reach the game rather than the page around it; after that the page will not scroll out from under you. On a touchscreen, swipe anywhere on the grid itself. The swipe needs to travel about a centimetre before it registers, and resting a finger on the board will not drag the page away.

On a computer the grid is 500 pixels square, so each of the sixteen tiles is about 107 pixels across with figures up to 55 pixels tall, in a plain typeface with no thin strokes. In a window narrower than roughly 520 pixels the board shrinks to fit and the numbers on the 128 tile and above shrink further, so a tablet held in landscape keeps them largest. The 2 and 4 tiles are dark grey on cream, the clearest pairing here; 8 to 64 are orange with white numbers; from 128 upward the tiles turn yellow-gold, still white, which is the palest combination on the board. There is no clock and no move limit, the position is saved on your own device after every move, and nothing covers the grid except the end-of-game panel.

2048 was written by Gabriele Cirulli, an Italian web developer, over a single weekend, and published on 9 March 2014 as free and open-source software under the MIT licence. It was a personal exercise rather than a product, which is the reason we can host our own copy here. Cirulli built it as his version of a game called 1024 by Veewo Studio, wanting quicker animations and a cleaner look, and he has since said that at the time he did not know about Threes, the game the whole family descends from.

Threes came out for the iPhone on 6 February 2014, made by a three-person team called Sirvo: designer Asher Vollmer, illustrator Greg Wohlwend and composer Jimmy Hinson. They spent more than six months refining the idea of sliding numbers together in a cramped space. Within about a month, free imitations had travelled further than the original, and 2048 travelled furthest of all because it cost nothing and ran in any browser. The target number is arbitrary — 2048 is simply the eleventh doubling of 2 — which is why reaching it need not end the game. For the same patient sort of attention, try Sudoku or Nonogram.

This is a self-hosted, open-source version of 2048 (source), used under its MIT licence and hosted here so it loads fast and shows no third-party adverts inside the game. Browse all of our free games.