2048

The board, and how a game ends

The board is 4×4 — 16 squares. A square is either empty or holds a power of 2: 2, 4, 8, 16 and up. Tiles carry a number and nothing else, no picture and no letter, because a number reads the same in every language the app speaks.

Making a 2048 tile is the goal, and it is announced once: the game tells you that you reached 2048 and offers Keep Going. Nothing is taken away and nothing stops — the board and the score are exactly where you left them. The original game asks whether you would like to continue; since there is no other sensible answer, that question is a button here.

• No moves left is the only ending: every square is full and no two neighbours — up, down, left or right — hold the same number.
• Diagonals never join. A full board whose only equal pair sits diagonally is finished, however close those two tiles look.
• There is nothing else to lose to. No clock runs, no direction is forbidden, and no mistake is ever flagged — the game ends only when the board leaves you nothing to join.

The board is 4×4 and only 4×4 in this release. A bigger grid is a different game, and a best score that meant something different on every size would mean nothing on any of them.

Controls, and what one move does

Swipe in any of the four directions, or use the arrow keys. A drag has to travel 24px before it counts as a swipe at all, and the larger of its horizontal and vertical distance decides which way you meant.

The move then resolves one line at a time — each row for a sideways swipe, each column for an up or down swipe — working from the wall you swiped at inwards.

• Everything in the line slides as far as it can toward that wall, closing the gaps.
• Two touching tiles of the same number become one tile of double the value, and the gaps close again.
• A tile that has just merged cannot merge again in the same move. A line of 2, 2, 4 swiped left becomes 4, 4 — not 8.
• Pairs resolve from the wall inwards, so 2, 2, 2 swiped left becomes 4, 2: the two nearest the wall join and the third waits its turn.
• A direction that would change nothing does nothing at all — no sound, no new tile, nothing. The whole board is face up, so a closed direction is something you could already see, not a mistake to be told off for.

The new tile, and the deal behind it

Every move that changes the board puts down exactly one new tile. It lands on a square picked evenly from the empty ones, and shows a 2 90% of the time and a 4 the other 10%. A new game opens with 2 tiles already down.

That draw is not a live coin flip. It is settled by the game’s seed and by how many tiles have appeared so far, so the same board played the same way always ends up in the same place. A golden test pins the opening board and a short run of moves for one fixed seed, which means changing the odds or the deal has to be a decision rather than a slip.

• A move that changes nothing spawns nothing, so trying a direction that turns out to be closed never costs you a square.
• Because the deal is fixed in advance, the game can promise something a reroll cannot: put the board back, swipe the same way again, and the same tile returns to the same square.
• Every board is generated on your device from its seed. Nothing is downloaded, there is no account and no cloud save, and your game data stays on the device.

Undo, and why there is no Hint

Undo is the only help this game offers, which is exactly why it is offered without conditions. Everything on the board is already in front of you, so the one thing a player can genuinely be short of is a move back.

• Undo is unlimited and free from the first launch. It steps the board, the score and the game’s place in the draw back together, so an undone merge takes its points back with it.
• Undo never rerolls. Take a move back, swipe the same way, and you get the same tile in the same square. It exists so you can try a different direction, not so you can fish for a better draw — an Undo that redealt would be a slot machine wearing a helpful label.
• The history holds 2000 moves, which no real game comes close to spending.
• Undo is never behind an ad or a purchase. Of everything on this page, that is the sharpest deliberate difference from the many other versions of this game where taking one move back is the thing being sold.
• There is no Hint. Every tile is face up and nothing is hidden, so a hint could only name the move it thinks is best — and that is the app playing instead of you.
• There is no revive to buy and no video to watch for one more move. When a board is finished it is finished, and the next one costs nothing.

The undo history is not saved. A game you come back to later is exactly the board you left, but the moves that built it are gone, and Undo starts counting again from there.

Score, records, and coming back later

The score is the sum of everything you have made: each merge adds the value of the tile it produced, so joining two 8s adds 16. Moves and time never enter into it — a long game is not worth more than a good one.

The score stays on screen because it is the result of what you just did, not a target counting down at you. There is no clock anywhere during play; your time is recorded quietly and appears only in Statistics.

• Two records are kept between games: Best score and Largest tile. Statistics adds games played, how many times you reached 2048, and total play time.
• There is no leaderboard, no friends list and no sharing. Your records stay on the device, and the only player you are measured against is the one who played yesterday.
• There are no levels and no daily board, and no streak is counted anywhere. Every new game is a fresh deal, and nothing here is built to summon you back at a particular hour.
• One game is saved at a time, with its board, score, seed, place in the draw and elapsed time. A turn-based board can be put down and picked up unchanged, so Resume hands you the same position rather than an approximation of it.
• If a save ever fails or comes back damaged, it is discarded and a new board starts. A broken save never blocks the game.

The score takes the accent colour for a beat when it moves, and only a merge can move it — so a move that joined nothing passes without comment. Reduced Motion, from the app’s settings or from the system, turns the slides and that flourish off: tiles are simply drawn where they now are.

Tips that come straight from the rules

• Count squares, not points. A move with one merge turns 2 tiles into 1 and then adds the new one, leaving the board exactly as full as before. A move with no merge leaves you a square poorer, and a move with two merges hands one back. Games end because that budget ran out.
• Park your largest tile in a corner and keep it there. It can only ever join a tile of its own value, and building that partner beside it is far easier when the big one has not wandered off.
• In practice that means living on the two directions that press toward your corner, and reaching for a third only when nothing else moves. The direction that pulls everything away from the corner is the expensive one: it drags the whole stack off the wall and drops a new tile behind it.
• Line up the pairs before you swipe. Two matching tiles with a stranger between them do not join, and the move that shifts that stranger out of the way is usually the real move.
• When a swipe would join several pairs at once, take it. One move can resolve more than one pair, and every extra pair is another square handed back.
• Use Undo to compare directions, not to shop for tiles. What a given move hands you is already decided, so the only thing worth taking back is the choice you made.

Questions people ask