Say goodbye to your free time. The latest game people have become obsessed with is 2048.
Like Sudoku, it involves numbers. And like Candy Crush, it involves moving tiles around vertically and horizontally. The goal is to combine numbers until you reach 2048 or more.
The game’s creator, Italian developer Gabriele Cirulli, has captured that elusive quality of any successful game: easy to learn, difficult to master.
But it was not a completely original idea. It’s based on a game called “Threes,” which launched for iOS earlier this year. That game contained a fatal flaw, in that it cost money ($1.99). Another game called 1024 came out shortly afterward, followed by 2048, which is free to play on the Web.
While there is no official app, the game can be played from a mobile browser. (There are unofficial versions of the game available for Android and iOS).
On his GitHub website, Cirulli notes that 2048 is “based on 1024 by Veewo Studio and conceptually similar to Threes by Asher Vollmer.”
And while the game might be a clone of a clone, Cirulli has made the code freely available to anybody who wants it, resulting in some inventive variations, including 2048 games based on Flappy Bird, Dogecoin and a sketch from the British TV comedy show “Mitchell and Webb.”