To win at 2048, pick a corner, and never betray it

• 1Pick a corner, before you even swipe once.
• 2Order the row along that edge, largest to smallest.
• 3Keep it full: that row is what protects your corner.

The hole, not the direction

Everyone repeats that you must never swipe away from your corner. That is a shortcut, and the grid below shows it in one click. Swipe right on the full row: nothing moves, your 1024 is in no danger. Punch a single hole in that row, replay the exact same swipe, and the 1024 leaves its corner.

Why the corner

A big tile is only useful the day its equal turns up. A 1024 can merge with exactly one thing: another 1024. Until then it sits there taking up a square, and it is the most expensive piece of furniture on the board.

If that tile wanders, it cuts the grid into regions and shrinks the space you can actually work in. In a corner it has two walls behind it, out of everyone's way.

The ordered row

The corner alone is not enough. What matters just as much is the top row sorted in decreasing order: 1024, 512, 256, 128.

The reason is mechanical. When a second 128 finally arrives and merges, the 256 it produces lands right next to the 256 already there. Those two can merge on the next swipe, the 512 that comes out lands next to the existing 512, and so on down the chain. The order does not collapse the row in a single swipe, a freshly merged tile is locked for the rest of that move, but it means each merge sets up the next one. A row out of order often breaks the chain of merges you were setting up.

So most of your moves are not about making a big tile. They are about keeping that row in order by feeding it from below.

Your four directions

Say you have picked the top-left corner.

1. Left and Up are your working moves: they push everything towards your corner and keep the row packed.
2. Down is the fallback, for when neither of them changes anything.
3. Right is only played when the top row is full, and when in doubt, not played at all.

Feeding from below

Once the top row is locked, the game becomes a logistics problem in the three rows below: merge small tiles until you have something worth promoting, then push it up.

• Keep the top row full. A hole in it is somewhere a new 2 can land, and, as you have just seen, your 1024's way out.
• Merge at the bottom before you merge at the top. Clearing 2s and 4s frees space; making one more 256 you have nowhere to put uses it up.

The rhythm ends up looking like this: several quick Left–Up moves to tidy the bottom, then one move that promotes a tile into the row.

The three mistakes that ruin a good game

• Swiping down “just to see”. If the top row has a hole, your corner goes with it. A swipe that moves nothing costs nothing; a swipe that moves the wrong tile costs the game.
• Letting a small tile get stuck in the top row. A 2 between your 512 and your 256 breaks the chain: nothing merges until it is out, and it only gets out downwards, undoing what you had tidied.
• Merging too early. A 256 born far from its twin then has to cross the board. When you can, wait for the merge to happen next to the tile it must join.

The rules, precisely

A 4×4 grid. Every swipe slides all tiles as far as they go, and two equal tiles that collide merge into their sum. A tile that has just been created by a merge cannot merge again during that same swipe. After every move that changed something, a new tile appears on a random empty square: a 2 nine times out of ten, a 4 one time out of ten.

One thing worth knowing early: a swipe that moves nothing does nothing at all. Nothing slides, nothing merges, and no new tile appears. Trying a direction to see whether it moves the board never costs you a move.

And since almost every new tile is a 2, most of what fills the board is small tiles to be cleared by merging. It is the empty squares that run out, long before the moves that score.

How far can you go?

These merge counts assume every tile that appears is a 2; the occasional 4 shortens the trip a little.

In this version

The controls

Swipe anywhere on the screen, not just on the board. On a keyboard, the arrow keys move the tiles and Escape opens the pause menu. Resume, New game, Main menu.

• Your score is the sum of the merges, and that is what goes to the leaderboard.
• Reaching 2048 opens a win panel with Keep going.
• No undo button. A single Second chance rewinds your last move, once per game, and only in the Pause Android app.
• The board and the score are saved after every move: leave, come back, Continue. A new game erases that save.
• Leaving through Main menu submits your running score, so an abandoned run still counts.

If you change one thing

Pick your corner before your first swipe and keep your biggest tile in it for the whole game, including on the moves where taking it out looks harmless.

Frequently asked questions