What Strategies to use for Winning the Game 2048

The new hit wonder in the online game industry, the game 2048 can be quite addictive. We talked about it before and warned you that it can ruin your work schedule and productivity, but that did not stop you. You are probably playing it right now and starting to look for some strategies to get a higher score and finish the game. Unless you want to use an automated solution with hints, here's our approach.

Stick to a corner

When building up, move only in 3 directions and keep all the big numbers into a single corner.

For example, let's make the top-left corner our 'sticky corner'. You can choose any corner and apply the same strategy, but we'll use top-left in our guide. Start by moving only up or left and repeat. If you get stuck, move to the right as well, but not down.

That's it. This simple strategy should allow you to get a high score and in most cases, finish the game. See below how a game in progress will look like with this strategy applied.

Further tips

Avoid the empty moves. Every time you move the table, a new number shows up so try to combine numbers with every move in order to have as many free spaces as possible. This implies that you should combine 2s and 4s as soon as possible and not end up with a few bigger numbers and a lot of small ones. Keep it balanced.

Avoid the move 'down'. Even if moving down will combine tiles. In some cases you'll get stuck and the move 'down' is your only choice. In that case, make the move 'down' and then back up if possible. Then stick to the same strategy as before. If moving back up is not possible since a 2 just spawned into the top-left corner, then you have 2 options: you can quit the game now and start a new one or try to clear the 'sticky' top-left corner and get the highest tile back there. See an example of this later case below.

Moved Down	Moved Right then Up

Give this a try and let us know how it works out for you, or share your own strategies in the comments section below.

Update: Since this game is so addictive, I kept playing and further putting this strategy to the test. Here are more screens with the 2048 tile and right before it.

When everything lines up just right	Tile 2048 shows the option to continue

Update 2: You can even get to 4096 with a little bit of practice as you can see from my latest score below.

Working in a 'snake' pattern	The black 4096 tile