2048 Merge Game

About this test

The game was written in 2014 by Gabriele Cirulli, an Italian developer, who built it over a weekend as a personal exercise and released it as open source. He drew on existing tile-merging games himself. Within weeks it became one of the most played browser games in the world and was cloned and reskinned thousands of times.

The mechanic is entirely deterministic with one exception: where the new tile appears after each move. That's what makes it a genuine strategy game rather than a game of luck. Every tile slides at once in the chosen direction, two equal values that meet merge and double, and the grid gains one tile. The only way to lose is to run out of legal moves.

The standard strategy is corner anchoring: pick a corner, keep your largest tile there, build a descending row along that edge, and forbid yourself the direction that would pull the big tile out. Playing three directions out of four looks like a handicap; in practice it's the only way past 1024. That forbidden move is behind almost every run that ends early.

How it works

Your score adds up the value of every merge: merging two 64s is worth 128 points. The run ends when none of the four directions produces a move. The 0-100 score starts at zero and caps at 12,000 points, roughly what a clean run to the 2048 tile is worth.