The first two variations are live: a 3×3 board and a 5×5 board. Same rules, same controls, same game — one number changed, and both of them play nothing like the original.
4×4 is not a neutral choice. Sixteen cells is the number that makes 2048 feel the way it does: tight enough that a careless move costs you, loose enough that you can usually recover from one. Move that number and the whole character of the game moves with it, without a single rule being rewritten.
That is the kind of variation worth building. Reskinning the tiles gives you a different-looking 2048; resizing the grid gives you a different puzzle.
With nine cells instead of sixteen, the board fills before you have finished thinking. There is almost no space to park a tile you are not ready to use, so the usual habit of shuffling sideways while you wait for a useful spawn stops working — every move has to do something. Games are short and end abruptly, and the first few will end sooner than you expect.
The extra row and column cut the other way. There is space to keep a corner stacked while you sort out the rest of the board, mistakes stay recoverable for far longer, and a run goes on well past where a 4×4 game would have closed out. It is the relaxed version — right up until the point where a board that big gets genuinely hard to untangle.
The obvious way to do this is one engine with the grid size as a setting. I did not. Each board is its own self-contained copy of the engine, which costs some duplication now and buys the freedom to change one variant later without touching the others — and the original 4×4 game is the last thing on this site I want to put at risk for the sake of tidiness.
One thing to flag: the Hint and Auto Play buttons do not appear on either of the new boards yet. The solver's scoring is tuned around a 16-cell grid, and pointing it at a different board without retuning it would produce confident, plausible, wrong advice. Better to ship the boards without it than to ship a hint that lies.
More variations are queued, and the ones that change the maths rather than the size are the interesting half. Whatever has shipped so far is listed on the variations page.
Ready to put it into practice?
Play 2048