Neon 2048

Build the largest tile across four neon rule sets with keyboard or swipe controls.

Neon 2048

Slide every tile on the board in one direction and matching numbers merge. This version ranks you by the biggest tile you make in a run, not by points. The classic running score and your move count still appear on the result screen, but only the biggest tile goes on the leaderboard.

There are four rule sets, each with its own leaderboard. Normal is the classic 4 by 4 game aiming for 2048. Normal+ adds wild tiles to the same board. Hard is an 8 by 8 board where every move adds two new tiles, with 8192 as the goal. Hard+ adds wild tiles and stone blocks on top of that.

Where new tiles come from

A run starts with two number tiles. After that, a new tile appears on a random empty cell only when something actually moved, and it is a 2 nine times in ten and a 4 otherwise. A swipe that moves nothing does not count and spawns nothing. The run ends when no direction can move anything.

Reaching the goal tile marks the run as a success, but play does not stop there. After the goal banner you can keep going for a bigger tile, and the leaderboard takes the biggest one you had when the run ended.

Wild tiles and stones

The star-shaped wild tile merges with any number and produces double that number, so a wild next to a 512 makes 1024 straight away. Two wilds together make a 4. Each new tile has a 5% chance of being wild in Normal+ and 6% in Hard+. Spending a wild on a 2 or a 4 wastes it; drag it toward your biggest tile and use it to skip a step there.

In Hard+, every twelfth move that actually moves something drops a stone on an empty cell, up to eight per run. Stones never merge, never slide, and tiles cannot pass through them, so a stone in the middle of a row splits it into two parts that move separately. You can count to the next stone, so as the twelfth move approaches, tidy up the area around your big tiles so the stone has nowhere harmful to land.

Surviving Hard

Sixty-four cells sounds roomy, but two new tiles per move fill the board faster than you expect. The 4 by 4 habit still works: park your biggest tile in a corner and avoid the direction that would pull it out. Since you cannot choose where the two new tiles land, prefer moves that leave at least two empty cells.

Controls and records

Use the arrow keys or W, A, S, D. With a mouse or on a touch screen, drag across the board in the direction you want and release; very short drags are ignored. Esc pauses, Q while paused leaves to the menu without a result, M toggles sound and E toggles motion effects. There is no undo. The rule cards on the start screen show the biggest tile you have made with each rule set on this device.