2048

How to play

Every move slides all the tiles as far as they will go in one direction. When two tiles with the same number collide they merge into a single tile of double the value, and that value is added to your score. After each move a new 2 or 4 appears in a random empty square.

The game ends when the board is full and no two neighbouring tiles match, so nothing can merge. Reaching a 2048 tile is the nominal goal, though you can keep playing past it.

• On a phone, swipe in any direction, or use the buttons below the board.
• On a computer, the arrow keys.

Strategy that actually works

2048 rewards discipline far more than cleverness. Four things account for most of the difference between reaching 512 and reaching 2048.

1. Pick a corner and never leave it

Choose one corner, keep your largest tile there, and do not move it. Most players use bottom right. This means you only ever press two of the four directions freely, down and right, and treat up and left as emergencies.

The reason this matters is that a large tile in the middle of the board splits your space in two. Nothing can merge across it, and both halves fill up faster than either can be cleared.

2. Build a descending row

Along the edge holding your largest tile, aim for values that decrease as they move away from the corner. Something like 512, 256, 128, 64 across the bottom row. That arrangement lets a chain of merges cascade in one move, which is where large scores come from.

3. Never press the direction that empties your anchor row

If your big tiles are along the bottom, pressing up is what kills games. It lifts your entire structure, a new tile drops into the gap underneath, and the arrangement you spent thirty moves building is gone. Accept a worse position rather than pressing it.

4. Keep the board as empty as you can

Merge early and merge often, even small merges. Players lose because they run out of space, not because they run out of large tiles. A board with six empty squares has options. A board with one is already over, you just have not seen it yet.

The arithmetic underneath

Every tile is a power of two, and reaching 2048 means 2 to the eleventh power. To build one 2048 tile you need two 1024s, which need four 512s, which need eight 256s, and so on down. All the way down, a single 2048 tile requires 1,024 tiles of value 2 to have appeared and merged.

Since each move produces one new tile, and the great majority are 2s, you need well over a thousand moves in a successful game. That is the real reason 2048 rewards consistency over brilliance. One careless move at tile 900 undoes a great deal of careful work.

A note on the score

Your score is the sum of every merge, not the value of your highest tile. Merging two 512s into a 1024 adds 1,024 points. This means the score climbs slowly and then very quickly, and it also means two players reaching 2048 can have quite different scores depending on how efficiently they got there.

Your best score is kept in your browser's local storage on your own device. Nothing is uploaded, and clearing your browser data resets it.

Common questions