2048 Advance

About the game

2048 Advance brings the 2048 puzzle to the Game Boy Advance. The board is a four by four grid that starts with two tiles. Every press of the D-pad slides all the tiles as far as they can go in that direction, and when two tiles with the same number meet, they merge into one with double the value: two 2s make a 4, two 4s make an 8, and so on. After each move a new tile appears in an empty square, usually a 2 and now and then a 4.

The merged values add up to your score, shown beside the board next to your best. The goal is to build a 2048 tile. Reaching it brings up a "You win!" screen, and after it the same board comes back, so you can keep going for 4096 and 8192. The game ends when the grid is full and no slide can merge anything.

This version pays attention to the feel of the game on the handheld: tiles slide and grow with short animations, merges flash and add a small score tally, and each kind of merge has its own sound, a little higher as the numbers grow. The rules are the ones of the original 2048 by Gabriele Cirulli, credited on the title screen.

Playing it here

This is a homebrew game made for the Game Boy Advance: a new game by an independent developer, not a commercial release. Basil Termini wrote it for the GBA Jam 2024 and kept improving it afterwards; this is version 1.3.1. It runs here in the mGBA emulator. Click Play, then press Enter on the title screen.

The site already has another 2048, a compact version for the WASM-4 fantasy console. This one is the Game Boy Advance port, with its own look, animations and sounds.

The game keeps its save on the cartridge, which here means in this browser. Your best score is stored, and pressing Enter (Start) during a game stores the board too: next time, the title screen leads straight back to it. F2 also saves the state of the emulator at any moment and F4 brings it back. A gamepad works too.

Controls

Tips

Keep your biggest tile in a corner. Pick one corner, say bottom left, and build towards it. Mostly use two directions that push tiles into that corner, use the third when you must, and avoid the fourth, which tends to pull the big tile out.

Fill the edge row first. With the corner tile in place, keep the row along it full and in decreasing order. A full row cannot move sideways by accident, and its tiles line up to merge one after another.

Merge small tiles early. Loose 2s and 4s scattered around the board are what fill it up. Clearing them while there is still room is easier than fixing a crowded grid later.

Save before a risky move. Enter saves the board as it is. If a long game is going well, save before you try something bold.

Credits and licence

2048 Advance was made by Basil Termini (Paperdomo101), who created the code, the graphics and the sound effects, with code contributions to version 1.2 by Carsten Teibes. It is dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. The ROM uses the libtonc library by J Vijn (MIT licence) and the maxmod sound system by Mukunda Johnson (ISC licence), and contains the start-up file of the devkitARM toolchain, released under the Mozilla Public License 2.0, whose source code is hosted alongside the game. The original 2048 was created by Gabriele Cirulli. The licence texts are linked from this page.