2048 is a single-player sliding tile puzzle designed by Gabriele Cirulli. What follows is the complete rulebook — objective, setup, how a turn works, and the exact conditions for winning and losing — written the way a printed rulebook would state it, section by section.
Slide numbered tiles around a 4×4 grid, combining matching tiles, to create a tile bearing the number 2048. Reaching that tile wins the game, but play may continue afterward for a higher score.
One. There is no timer and no turn limit — the game is played at your own pace, and a game in progress is saved automatically so it can be resumed later.
A single board of 16 cells, arranged in a 4×4 grid. Every cell either holds one numbered tile or is empty. Tiles are always a power of two — 2, 4, 8, 16, and so on.
At the start of a game, two tiles are placed on random cells. Each starting tile is a 2 (90% chance) or a 4 (10% chance). No other setup is required — there is no shuffling, dealing, or choice of starting position.
On your turn, choose one of four directions — up, down, left or right. Every tile on the board slides as far as it can in that direction in a single motion, stopping only at the edge of the board or against another tile. All tiles move at once; there is no choosing which tile moves and which stays.
After tiles finish sliding and merging (see below), one new tile — a 2 or a 4, by the same 90/10 odds as setup — appears on a random empty cell. That completes the turn.
A direction is only a legal move if it changes the board — at least one tile has to slide into empty space, or at least one pair has to merge. If a direction would do neither (for example, pressing left when every tile is already pushed as far left as it can go), nothing happens: the board stays exactly as it was, and no new tile is added. Illegal moves cost nothing, so there is no penalty for testing a direction to see what it does.
When a sliding tile collides with another tile carrying the same number, the two combine into a single tile holding their sum — which, because both started equal, is always double the original value. Two 2s become a 4; two 512s become a 1024.
Three rules govern exactly how merging works, and all three matter for planning a move:
4 4 4 4 pushed left becomes 8 8 — never a single 16.4 4 4 pushed left merges the first pair, leaving 8 4 — not 4 8.The score starts at zero. Every time two tiles merge, the value of the new tile is added to the score — merging two 256s adds 512 points. Sliding tiles without merging them adds nothing, no matter how many tiles move or how far.
Because scoring is tied entirely to merges, the score is less a measure of skill than of how large a tile you have built: a single 2048 tile represents 20,480 points of merges that had to occur beneath it (a little less in practice, since tiles that spawn as a 4 skip one of those merges). Your best score persists in your browser between visits, alongside the game in progress.
The moment a merge produces a tile showing 2048, you have won. A banner confirms it and offers two choices: Keep going, which returns you to the same board so play can continue toward 4096, 8192 and beyond, or starting a new game. Winning does not end the game unless you choose to stop.
The game ends the moment no legal move remains, which requires both of the following to be true at once:
A full board is not automatically a lost one — as long as one matching pair exists anywhere on the grid, merging it frees a cell and the game continues. Only when the board is both full and merge-less does it actually end.
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
↑ ↓ ← → or W A S D | Slide tiles in that direction |
K H J L | Slide tiles, vim-style (up, left, down, right) |
| Swipe | Slide tiles on a touchscreen |
R | Restart the game |
This page states the rules; it doesn't explain why some of them trip people up in practice or how the built-in solver decides a move — for that, see the full how-to-play guide, tested strategy notes, or how the solver works.
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