Welcome. This site started as a passion project, and the goal behind it is a simple one: an easier, more convenient way to play 2048 anywhere, any time — on a phone on the bus, or on a computer between two things that need doing — with more than one version of the game to work through.
I have lost more hours to 2048 than I would like to admit, and almost none of them to a version I actually enjoyed loading. That is the whole reason this exists.
There is no shortage of places to play it. What there is a shortage of is places that respect the two minutes you came to spend. Most of them want an app install, or a sign-up, or they bury the board under a wall of adverts and a video that starts playing on its own. By the time the grid appears, the impulse that made you search for it has gone.
So the rule here is that the board is the first thing on the page and the fastest thing to arrive. Open the address, and it is already waiting. No download, no account, no email, nothing to dismiss before you can make the first move.
“Convenient” means the same game has to feel native on two very different devices, rather than being built for one and grudgingly resized for the other.
Swipe in any direction to move the tiles. The board scales to the screen you actually have, so it is playable one-handed and nothing important ends up below the fold. It runs in the browser you already have open — there is nothing to install and nothing taking up space afterwards.
Arrow keys work, and so do WASD and HJKL if your hands already live there. Everything is keyboard-driven, so a game can start and finish without you reaching for the mouse once.
The original 4×4 board is the default and always will be. But once the engine existed, it seemed a waste to stop at one version of the puzzle, so the plan is to keep adding variations that change the maths rather than just the paint.
What I want to get through: a 3×3 board, where nine cells fill up fast enough to turn every move into a decision, and a 5×5 with room to breathe and much longer games. A 1024 finish line for a quick win, and an 8192 one two doublings further out for a long haul. A Fibonacci merge rule, where only consecutive terms combine — 3 and 5 make 8, but 3 and 8 do nothing. A hexagonal grid with six directions of movement instead of four.
There is also a Hint button, and an Auto Play that hands the board over entirely. It is not a lookup table of memorised openings — it searches the possible futures of the position and picks the move with the best expected outcome, which means it can explain a board you have never seen before. Watching it dig out a position you had written off is, for my money, one of the better things on the site.
More languages, more variations, and notes here when something meaningful changes. Whatever has shipped since is listed on the variations page. Thanks for stopping by — the board is this way.
Ready to put it into practice?
Play 2048