Daily 2048 Challenge

How the Daily 2048 Challenge works

Regular 2048 starts with two tiles and takes hundreds of moves to get anywhere. The Daily Challenge skips to the part that decides the game: you get a board that is already well underway and one job, which is to make the 2048 tile. The controls and rules are the same as the classic game: use the arrow keys, WASD or a swipe, and equal tiles merge into their double.

Three things are different. The new tiles are fixed for the day, so the same moves always lead to the same board, and a failed attempt teaches you something you can use on the next one. You can restart as often as you like. And your score is the number of moves you needed, so solving it is only the first target: the second is doing it in fewer.

How long can you keep your streak going?

Open a game on consecutive days and the counter under the board goes up by one each time. Miss a day and it goes back to 1. A long streak takes a habit rather than one good game. Anyone can come back for a week, but a month in a row means coming back on your busy days too.

You do not have to solve the board for the day to count. Opening any game page on this site is enough, so a hard board never costs you a streak. A new day starts at midnight on your device. Your longest streak is kept beside the current one, so a broken run still leaves a record to beat.

What is the highest streak you can reach?

There is no limit. The counter keeps going for as long as you keep coming back, and we cannot tell you the record, because streaks are stored on your own device and never sent to us. That leaves your own longest streak as the number to beat. These are the milestones worth aiming for:

• 7 days: one full week, and the point where coming back starts to feel like a habit.
• 100 days: by now the hard part is rarely the board. It is remembering on a busy day, before midnight.
• 365 days: a full year without a single miss, through holidays, travel and every awkward board along the way.

What is a good number of moves?

It depends on the day, because some boards start much closer to 2048 than others, so moves are best compared within one challenge. After you solve it, we show how many moves our solver took on the same board with the same tiles. The solver plays to stay alive rather than to finish quickly, so its count is a target you can try to beat, not the lowest possible. Restarts cost nothing and only your best run is kept, so a solved challenge is still worth another attempt.

Getting through a hard board

Before your first move, find your biggest tiles and work out the order they need to merge in. These positions come from real games, so there is usually a chain to follow, and the usual mistake is breaking it to take a small merge somewhere else. The board rewards the habits our strategy testing found to matter: keep open cells in reserve above all, and do not let your largest tile get pushed out of its corner.

Use your restarts. Because the tiles repeat, a restart is not luck being rerolled. You already know where the next tile will land if you repeat your moves, so play up to the point where things went wrong and try something else there.

Just want an open-ended game? Play the original 2048, or try one of the other boards.

Frequently asked questions