2048

Play 2048 online, free

2048 is a sliding-tile puzzle built on a 4×4 grid. Every move pushes the whole board one direction, matching numbers fuse into their double, and a new tile drops into the space you just freed. It is simple enough to understand in one move and hard enough that most first attempts stall somewhere around 256.

This version runs entirely in your browser — nothing to install, no account, and it works the same on a phone as on a desktop. Your game and your best score are saved locally, so you can close the tab mid-run and pick the same board up later. There is also a solver behind the Hint button, which is unusual, and more useful for learning than it first sounds.

How to play

Press a direction and every tile slides that way until it hits a wall or another tile. Two tiles carrying the same number merge into one of double the value, and a new 2 or 4 appears in a random empty cell afterwards. Get a tile to 2048 and you have won — though you can keep going from there.

Three details that are easy to miss:

• A tile can only merge once per move. A row of 4 4 4 4 pushed left becomes 8 8, never a 16.
• If a direction moves nothing and merges nothing, it is not a legal move — the board stays put and no new tile appears.
• The game ends only when the board is full and no two neighbours match. A full board with one matching pair is still alive.

You can play with the arrow keys, WASD, or HJKL if you have vim in your fingers. R starts a new game, and on a touchscreen you can simply swipe across the board. The complete rules, controls and scoring go into the rest.

Three things that actually improve your game

Advice about 2048 is plentiful and largely untested, so we tested it: we ran the popular tips as algorithms over thousands of simulated games and measured what each one is worth. The short version:

1. Commit your largest tile to a corner and keep it there. This is the one piece of standard advice that holds up under measurement. Disabling the corner term in our solver — same search, same starting boards, nothing else changed — drops its win rate from 100.0% to 75.0%.
2. Value empty cells above merges. Space is what lets you keep choosing; a board with one free cell has already made most of your decisions for you. Our solver weights free space more heavily than any other factor, corner control included, and it is the main reason it survives positions that feel lost.
3. Do not follow a fixed pattern. The most repeated tip on the internet is to alternate two arrow keys and fall back to a third when stuck. Run exactly that as an algorithm over 80 games and it reaches 2048 0.0% of the time. It is a good way to build early structure and a reliable way to lose later.

The full results, including where the conventional wisdom is wrong, show the numbers behind each of these.

What the Hint and Auto Play buttons do

Hint runs a real search over your current board and flashes an arrow for the move it rates highest. Auto Play keeps taking that move until the game ends. Both run locally, in your browser, on the position actually in front of you — nothing is sent anywhere and no two hints are canned.

The most productive way to use it is to decide your own move first, then press Hint. Agreement teaches you nothing; disagreement points straight at a board you are misreading. How the solver picks its move explains the search and the four things it measures on every board.

Frequently asked questions