20 posts
Why does 2048 give you a 4 when you were expecting a 2? Because the game rolls a die for every new tile, and about 1 roll in 10 comes up 4. It is not a bonus and it is not a punishment: it is one line of code. This guide…
A flipped edge on a Rubik's cube is a piece sitting in its own spot with its two colours the wrong way round. If you find just one, with everything else solved, no amount of turning will fix it. Edges flip in pairs. This…
A Rubik's cube corner twist is the one move you can never make on its own. Turn the faces any way you like and the corners travel and twist, but never one corner by itself. This guide shows the three ways a corner can…
Rubik's cube centre pieces are the one part of the puzzle that never changes places. Scramble the cube as hard as you like and the six centres stay in the same order around it. This guide explains what holds them there,…
How many moves does it take to get 2048? At least 1,022 if every new tile is a 2, and about 930 with the usual mix of 2s and 4s. Real games take more, because other tiles are still on the board when the 2048 appears. You…
Why do I keep getting stuck in 2048? Almost every player asks it after a run of games that end around the 128 or 256 tile. The answer is rarely bad luck alone. A board fills up because of a few habits, and each one has a…
What happens after 2048? The game is won, a message says so, and then you get a choice: start again, or keep going. Most people have never seen that choice, so it is a fair question. This post explains what the original…
What is the highest tile in 2048? On the classic 4 by 4 board, the largest possible tile is 131,072, according to Wikipedia's 2048 article). That is 64 times the 2048 tile that wins the game. You do not have to take the…
If you want to know how to get a high score in 2048, start with what the score actually counts. It is not a clock and it is not a count of moves. It is every merge you make, added up. So a high score comes from two…
Rubik's cube notation for beginners comes down to six letters and three small marks. Once you can read them, any written move list, from a solving guide or a competition scramble, turns into turns your hands can make.…
Playing 2048 on a 3x3 board sounds like an easier warm-up: fewer squares, fewer tiles to track. In practice it is the opposite. With 9 squares instead of 16, the board fills in a few dozen moves, and a simple count shows…
How does 2048 scoring work? The short answer: every time two tiles merge, you get the value of the new tile as points, and nothing else scores. That one rule explains why your score jumps late in a game, why two players…
You can play 3D 2048 on a phone with nothing but your thumbs. There are no buttons for the moves: you slide, twist and turn the cube by dragging on it. This guide shows where each drag starts, what it does, how to hold…
How does a Rubik's cube turn? Each face sits on one layer of pieces, and that whole layer turns a quarter at a time around a hidden core. The core is a cross of three axes that holds the six centre pieces and lets them…
Is 2048 a game of luck or skill? People who play it a lot tend to give one of two answers. Some say it is all strategy once you know the corner trick. Others say a bad tile at the wrong moment ends a good game, and no…
A good 2048 strategy for beginners comes down to one idea: pick a corner and build everything around it. 2048 looks like a game of quick reactions, but it rewards a plan, and the plan Wikipedia describes is simple enough…
These 3D 2048 tips come from play, not just from reading the rules. We played two test games in a browser, one with slides only and one with slides and twists, and watched where each one went wrong. Below is what they…
How many squares does a Rubik's cube have? The classic 3 by 3 by 3 cube has 54 coloured squares: six faces with nine squares on each. That number is easy to mix up with two others, the 26 small pieces you can see and the…
Who made 2048? The short answer is Gabriele Cirulli, an Italian web developer who wrote the game in a single weekend and shared it on GitHub in March 2014. This post covers the longer answer: why he made it, why it…
3D 2048 takes the sliding number puzzle and puts it on a cube with six faces. This guide shows you how to play 3D 2048: how to slide the front face, how to twist a row to bring tiles round from the other sides, and how…