Slide, merge, repeat. The math is simple, the addiction is not. One more move always feels achievable.
2048 is one of the few classic games here that's genuinely recent — it was built by 19-year-old Italian developer Gabriele Cirulli in a single weekend in March 2014, as an open-source clone of an earlier game called 1024 (itself inspired by Threes!). It went viral within days, racking up millions of plays before Cirulli had even finished adding basic polish, and the formula — slide, merge, watch the numbers double — turned out to be close to perfectly addictive: simple enough to grasp in five seconds, with just enough strategic depth (corner-stacking, planning two moves ahead) to keep good players coming back for a higher score. Over a decade later, the tile-merging genre it spawned is still everywhere.
Use the arrow keys to slide all tiles in one direction. Matching tiles merge into one with double the value. Reach the 2048 tile to win, or keep going for a higher score.
Your score is the sum of all merged tile values created during the run — the higher tiles you reach, the higher it climbs.
Looks enough like a spreadsheet that nobody walking past your desk will think twice.
You can keep playing past it — the board doesn't stop, and neither should you.
No undo — every slide is final, which is most of the difficulty.
You can keep going. You get a banner for reaching 2048, but the game carries on so you can push for a higher score.
Almost always a 2, about nine times in ten, and occasionally a 4.
Yes, swipe to slide the tiles. On a computer, use the arrow keys.
2048
Merge matching tiles to reach 2048. Arrow keys or swipe. Constitutes legitimate research.