2048 strategy: the corner method
Most players lose 2048 by reacting to the board. The winning approach is the opposite: pick a corner, commit to it, and let the board organise itself around one rule.
Pick a corner and never move the big tile out of it
Choose the bottom-left corner at the start of the run and treat it as permanent. Your largest tile lives there. The only direction that can pull it out of that corner is left, so you drift towards using only two moves — down and left — as your defaults. Everything else is a repair move.
This feels restrictive for the first fifty moves. That is the point: restricting your own moves is what keeps the board from filling with unmergeable tiles.
The snake pattern
Keep the bottom row sorted in descending order, largest on the left. The row above it should run in the opposite direction, and the row above that in the same direction again. The tiles then read like a single snake from the corner. When a new tile appears, it lands at the open end of the snake and can still merge upward.
Never swipe up unless you have to
Swipe up and the big tile leaves the bottom row — usually into a column where a small tile blocks it from coming back. In practice, up is the move that ends runs. If the board forces you to use it, do it once, then spend the next few moves restoring the bottom row before doing anything else.
When to give up on a run
If the bottom row has three different tiles that cannot merge and the fourth cell is occupied by something small, the run is usually over. It is faster to start again than to grind twenty moves for a 1% chance. Restarting is not losing; it is spending your time where the odds are.
The controls
Arrow keys or WASD on desktop, swipe on mobile. There is no timer, so plan the next two moves before making one — the only cost of thinking is that you will feel the mistake before you make it.
Play 2048 ↗