2048
Overview
2048 is a free, open-source sliding-tile puzzle game created by Gabriele Cirulli and released in March 2014. It is played on a 4×4 grid: slide all tiles in one of four directions with the arrow keys, and whenever two tiles carrying the same number collide they merge into one tile with double the value. Each move adds a new 2 or 4 tile, and the goal is to build a tile worth 2048 before the grid fills up.
Key Features
- One simple rule, real depth — merge matching tiles on a 4×4 board; a game takes a few minutes but a strong run needs planning and corner management.
- Runs entirely in the browser — plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript with no plugins, accounts, ads or tracking; the whole game is a handful of static files.
- Keyboard and touch input — arrow keys on the desktop and swipe gestures on phones and tablets, with score and best-score tracking kept locally.
- Installable as a web app — the official site can be added to a phone home screen, so it plays like a native app without an app store.
- Trivially forkable — the MIT-licensed source is small and readable, which is why it became one of the most forked repositories on GitHub (over 17,000 forks) and spawned countless ports, clones and remixes.
- No install, no server — drop the files on any static web host (or open them from disk) and the game works.
Why Use It
It is the cleanest possible example of a casual game done right: instant to learn, genuinely hard to master, and free of the monetisation machinery that defines most puzzle games on mobile. Because the source is MIT-licensed and self-contained, it is also a popular first project for people learning JavaScript or wanting to self-host a simple game on their own web space. This directory page documents the original upstream project — the game is unmaintained in the sense that it is finished rather than abandoned, with the last upstream commit in October 2024.
Use Cases
- A quick solo puzzle break in a browser tab, on desktop or phone.
- Self-hosting a lightweight, ad-free game on your own static site.
- Learning or teaching HTML/CSS/JavaScript from a small, complete, real-world codebase.
- Forking and remixing — re-theming the tiles, changing the grid size, or adding an AI solver.
Platforms
Any modern web browser on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS. The official site also ships as an installable web app for phones, and community ports exist for terminals, mobile app stores and game consoles — all derived from the same MIT-licensed source.
Licence
Free and open source — released under the MIT Licence, so the code can be used, modified and redistributed, including commercially, as long as the copyright notice is kept. The play2048.co site is the author’s own hosted instance of the same code.
Similar Tools
- A Dark Room — free and open source, another small browser-first casual game in the directory.