2048
Slide the whole board one direction. Two tiles with the same number crash together and become one bigger tile. That is the entire game — and it will still quietly eat twenty minutes of your afternoon.
Pick your boardArrow keys, WASD, a swipe across the board, or the pad underneath — every direction moves every tile at once. You get one undo per run, so a careless swipe is not the end of the world. Your best score lives in this browser tab only; a refresh starts you clean.
Arrow keys, WASD, or swipe the board
best tile 2 · 0 moves
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Practical encouragement for the ordinary parts of the week — the tired afternoon, the commute, the thing you keep putting off. Short, personal, and free. Leave any time.
Get it free →Common Questions About 2048
How do you play 2048?
You pick a direction and the whole board moves. Press an arrow key, use WASD, swipe across the tiles, or tap the pad underneath — every tile slides as far that way as it can go. When two tiles showing the same number run into each other they merge into one tile worth double, and your score goes up by whatever number you just made. Two and two become four. Four and four become eight. After every move a new tile appears in a random empty square, almost always a 2. The run ends when the board is full and no two touching tiles match, so there is nothing left to merge. On the classic four-by-four board the goal is the 2048 tile. There is also a tight three-by-three board where 256 is a real achievement, and a roomy five-by-five if you want more room to think. You get one undo per run, so a careless swipe does not have to end everything.
What is the best strategy for reaching the 2048 tile?
Almost everyone who reaches 2048 uses the same method, and it is simpler than it sounds. Pick one corner and decide that your biggest tile lives there permanently. Then only ever swipe in two directions — the one that pushes tiles into that corner, and one of the two directions along that edge. Never swipe the direction that would pull your big tile away from its corner, because once it moves out, everything behind it slides forward and the board turns into a mess you cannot untangle. Try to build a descending run along that edge: 256, 128, 64, 32, going out from the corner. When you do that, each merge cascades neatly into the next. The other half of the trick is patience. A lot of lost boards come from swiping fast because nothing obvious was happening. Take the extra second, look at where the big tiles are sitting, and make the move that keeps the shape rather than the one that scores right now.
Who invented 2048, and why is it free everywhere?
2048 was written by an Italian web developer named Gabriele Cirulli, who was nineteen at the time, and released on 9 March 2014. He built it over a single weekend in plain JavaScript and CSS, largely as an exercise to see whether he could, and he put it out as free and open-source software under the MIT licence. It was his own version of a game called 1024!, which was itself a take on Threes!, an iOS puzzle game released a month earlier. He has said publicly that he never expected it to go anywhere. Within weeks it was everywhere. Because Cirulli released the code openly rather than selling it, anyone can build their own version, which is why you can find 2048 on practically any site or app store without paying for it. The board on this page is our own build of the same idea: it runs entirely inside your browser, needs no account, saves nothing, and costs nothing.
Is 2048 a game of skill or luck?
Both, but far more skill than most people assume on their first few boards. The luck is real: you do not choose where the next tile appears, and a 4 dropping into the wrong square at the wrong moment can genuinely cost you a run that was going well. What you do control is the shape of the board when that happens. A tidy board, with the big tiles stacked along one edge and the small ones in front of them, can absorb an awkward spawn and keep going. A scattered board cannot, and one bad tile locks it. That is why two people can play the same number of games and end up hundreds of points apart. You are not really playing against the random tile generator. You are playing against how much room you left yourself when it arrives.
Can everyone eventually reach 2048?
Most people can, with practice, and far sooner than they expect. The jump usually happens the moment someone stops swiping in all four directions and commits to the corner method. Before that, boards tend to stall somewhere around 128 or 256 and it feels like a wall. After it, 512 turns up regularly, then 1024, and then one afternoon the 2048 tile appears and you realise it was built entirely out of twos. If the four-by-four board feels like a grind, the tight three-by-three is a genuinely different puzzle with a lower target, and it teaches the same instinct in a fraction of the time. Either way, nothing here is saved, nothing is scored against you, and every run starts clean. Pick a corner, hold it, and play the 2048 board above.