Wednesday, April 16, 2014

The 2048 game should be renamed to 4096

Yes, it was quite addictive and a good way to spend time waiting. But soon, after a day or two, I won - getting a 2048 square . I tested my strategy and soon it was obvious that it's pretty easy if you have the right simple strategy. A day or two more I got 4096 and my personal high score to date is 45184.

I don't think I'll be addicted to it anymore because it's too easy.  And once you get to 4096, there's not a lot of difference to get to 8192. But I'm not too interested to find out, unless there's a new SAVE feature so I don't need to start fresh every time from 2.

The strategy is simply to keep the largest square at the corner, with decreasing value outwards.  For example, at the bottom of the board, you should have:

128 64 32 16

You don't want to move the corner 128 to the right or up. If you keep the 4 squares occupied all the time, the bottom row  can't shift right. And you never need to shift the row up if they are the largest numbers.

You keep the largest squares at bottom and at left when you grow the numbers.  And always target the smallest square 1st at bottom. In this case if you get another 16 over the 16 at right bottom, you immediately carry on to get 256 at the left corner.

Things are seldom ideal. But still you target the smallest at bottom and they will be improved.

Also you never put a bigger number on top of a smaller number. They will happen from time to time but this is the 1st you have to deal with.

That's about it.

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