About 2048
Built by Italian developer Gabriele Cirulli over a weekend in March 2014 as a riff on the games Threes! and 1024. It hit 4 million plays in its first week and stayed in the App Store top-10 for months. Cirulli open-sourced it on day one — every clone you've seen since traces back to that repo.
How to play
- Arrow keys
- Slide all tiles in a direction
- Touch swipe
- Same as arrow keys
Tips
- Pick a corner — usually bottom-right — and never move your highest tile out of it.
- Build a chain along one row: 2 · 4 · 8 · 16 · 32… The next merge does itself.
- If the board fills, you've lost flexibility before you've lost the game. Undo (mentally) and stop making moves that lock tiles in.
- The levels are milestones, not gates — nothing speeds up, so play the level-5 chase (the 1024 tile) as patiently as level 1.