2048 is an addictive puzzle game that's simple, intuitive, and memorable. It takes a few seconds to understand the rules of 2048, but once you understand the basics, your brain will love coming up with new strategies and techniques that you can employ to raise your high score.

2048 is a simple browser and mobile game that was released in 2014 by Italian developer Gabriele Cirulli. 2048 is hosted for free on the internet for desktop web browsers. Native apps are available for free on iOS and Android.

The goal of 2048 is to combine numbers until they're as large as possible. At the start of a game of 2048, two numbers appear on a four-by-four grid in different locations. You play the game by swiping in a direction (or using an arrow key on the desktop version), which sends all of the numbers sliding in the direction that you swiped. Just like Tetris tiles, these numbers fall until they collide with something, whether it's a wall or another number. When two numbers that are the same hit each other, they combine and form a single number equal to their sum. Each time you combine two numbers, your score goes up.

Each time the player moves the tiles on the board, a number is added to a random empty tile. This number is either a 2 or a 4. You can then move the tiles again to combine this new number with your existing tiles, which adds another 2 or 4, adding more move possibilities. This basic cycle of making a move, getting a new tile, and then having the opportunity to make another move repeats until you either win or lose.

There's one important caveat to the rules here: you can't make a move if it doesn't move any tiles. In other words, if you've got all of your numbers stacked up at the bottom of the screen, swiping down won't do anything. If you want to change the board state and add a new tile, you'll have to swipe left, right, or up.

At first, it's easy to combine your tiles together. The first two tiles are usually both 2, so when a new 2 is added you can simply combine any two tiles to make a 4. When the tiles start getting bigger, however, it's harder to combine them. A 64 requires 32 2 tiles, so it can be tricky to get a second 64 to combine with your first. This means that your larger tiles will hang around on the game board for a while, serving as obstacles that you'll have to work around.

If you're not careful, you might wind up in a situation where all of the tiles are filled. If you can't combine any tiles on a board like this, the game ends. Your score still counts, but you'll need to start a new game if you want to beat your high score.

If you manage to get one of the tiles on your board all the way to 2048 (by making two 1024s and combining them), you'll get a victory screen. You can keep playing (for a big score) or restart and try to do it again! Many people enjoy trying to see how quickly and reliably they can make a 2048 tile, while others like trying to beat their previous scores and make the biggest numbers possible. 2048 is far from the biggest number you can make in 2048. Two 2048 tiles combine to make a 4096 tile, which in turn combines to an 8192 tile. The biggest tile possible in the game is 131,072.