2048

How to play

1. Pick a board size — 4×4 is the classic, 3×3 is a tight sprint, 5×5 gives you breathing room.
2. Slide the whole board in one of four directions: arrow keys or W A S D on a keyboard, a swipe on a touchscreen, or the arrow pad under the board.
3. Every tile travels as far as it can in that direction. When two tiles with the same number collide, they merge into one tile worth double.
4. After any move that changed something, a new 2 (or occasionally a 4) appears on a random empty square.
5. Keep merging until a 2048 tile appears. You can stop there or hit Keep playing and see how far the board will stretch.

Pressing U takes one move back, N starts a fresh board, and the board has to be focused for the keyboard to reach it — click or tab onto it once and the arrow keys stop scrolling the page.

Rules that decide every game

Three rules do almost all the work, and misreading any of them is what makes early games end badly.

A tile merges at most once per move. A row of 2 2 2 2 slid left becomes 4 4, not 8. The two new fours are fresh tiles and cannot merge again until your next move.

Merges resolve in the direction of travel. Take a row of 4 4 4. Slide left and the two leftmost tiles merge first, leaving 8 4. Slide right and the two rightmost merge instead, leaving 4 8. The wall you push toward decides which pair goes first, which is why the same row can produce two different boards.

A move that changes nothing is not a move. If no tile shifts and nothing merges, no new tile spawns and your position is untouched. There is no penalty for trying a direction that turns out to be blocked.

The game ends when the board is full and no two orthogonal neighbours match. A full board on its own is not game over — as long as one pair touches, you still have a move.

Scoring

Your score is simply the sum of every tile you have ever created by merging. Merge two 2s and you gain 4. Merge two 512s and you gain 1024. Tiles that spawn on their own are worth nothing, which is why the score is a fair measure of how much merging you actually did rather than how long you survived.

One consequence worth knowing: reaching a 2048 tile means you have scored at least 20,480 points, because every tile on the way to it had to be built from merges. If your score is much higher than that, you have been merging efficiently and clearing the small tiles instead of letting them clog the board.

Best scores are tracked separately for each board size, since a 5×5 run is not comparable to a 3×3 one.

Tips to improve

• Pick a corner and never leave it. Choose one corner — bottom-left is popular — and commit to keeping your largest tile there. Every strategy that works is a variation of this.
• Use only three directions. If your anchor is bottom-left, play down, left and right, and treat up as an emergency move. Sliding up lifts your big tile off its corner and is how most good runs die.
• Build a snake. Keep the bottom row in descending order, then the row above it in ascending order, so merges cascade along a zigzag path rather than stranding a large tile in the middle.
• Clear small tiles early. Stray 2s and 4s in the middle of the board are the real enemy. Merge them while the board is still open rather than working around them later.
• Think one move ahead about where tiles spawn. A new tile can only appear on an empty square, so deliberately keeping one edge full limits where the game can inconvenience you.
• Slow down when the board gets tight. Most losses happen during fast sequences of moves near a full board. If you have fewer than four empty squares, check each direction before committing.
• Use undo to learn, not to cheat. Take a move back, look at what the board would have become, and you will start spotting the same trap before you fall into it.

Privacy

The board, the random tile spawns and the scoring all happen inside your browser — there is no server involved in a single move. Your best score for each board size is kept in this device’s localStorage so it is waiting for you next time, and you can wipe it at any moment with the clear button. Nothing about your games is uploaded or shared.

2048 was originally created in 2014 by Gabriele Cirulli and released as open source under the MIT licence; this is an independent implementation of the same well-known rules, written from scratch for this site.

Last reviewed: September 21, 2026