2048
Every Merge Doubles
Slide the whole board in one of four directions. Tiles of equal value that collide merge into their sum, and every move that shifts something brings a new tile, nearly always a 2. Reach a tile of 2048 to win, then keep going if you like. Fill the board with nothing left to merge and the game is over.
How Fast Doubling Runs Away
2048 is eleven 2s multiplied together, and the board makes the cost of building it very concrete. A 4 costs two spawned tiles. An 8 costs two 4s, so four. Each doubling costs as much work as everything that came before it put together, which is why the game feels comfortable up to 256 and then stops being comfortable at all. Nothing about the rules changed; the same rule simply compounds. This is the ordinary shape of exponential growth, and it is why quantities that grow by multiplication rather than addition are so consistently misjudged.
How to play
- Arrow keys or a drag of the mouse slide every tile at once - there is no way to move one alone.
- Keep the largest tile in a corner and never move in the direction that would lift it out.
- Work along a single edge so the big tiles stay adjacent and mergeable.
- The game ends only when every square is full and no two neighbors match; while a square is empty, some move is still left.
