2048 Rules
2048 is a single-player puzzle game. The goal is to combine numbered tiles to reach the 2048 tile.
How to play
Use the arrow keys on desktop, or swipe in any direction on mobile, to slide all tiles at once. Every tile on the board moves as far as it can in that direction until it hits a wall or another tile.
When two tiles with the same number collide during a slide, they merge into a single tile worth their sum — two 2s become a 4, two 4s become an 8, and so on. Each tile can only participate in one merge per move, so two 4s and another 4 in a row will produce an 8 and a leftover 4, not a 12.
After every move, a new tile appears in a random empty cell. It will almost always be a 2, though occasionally a 4 turns up instead.
The game ends when the board is completely full and no two adjacent tiles share the same value — meaning no merge is possible in any direction.
Winning
You win the moment a 2048 tile appears on the board. You can choose to stop there or keep playing to chase higher tiles — 4096, 8192, and beyond. Your score is the sum of all tile values created by merges throughout the game.
Strategy tips
A common approach is to keep your highest tile locked in one corner and never move in a direction that would dislodge it. Building your tiles in a snake or cascade pattern from that corner — highest to lowest in a winding chain — gives merges the best chance of chaining together efficiently.
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About 2048
2048 was created by Gabriele Cirulli, a 19-year-old Italian web developer, over a single weekend in March 2014. He built it as a personal experiment — just to see if he could make a game from scratch — and released it as open source on GitHub. Within a week it had been played millions of times and spawned hundreds of clones.
The game draws inspiration from Threes! (released by Asher Vollmer and Greg Wohlwend in February 2014), a polished mobile puzzle game built around merging numbered cards. Cirulli also cited 1024! by Veewo Studio as an influence. Despite its simple rules, 2048 became one of the most-played browser games of its era.
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This is version 1.23.0 of 2048.
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