A 2048 hack

I recently again started obsessively playing 2048. It has gotten to a stage where I even look up high scores and strategy discussions for the game on Quora.

While my own high score is off by a factor of at least ten (without undo) and a hundred (with undo), I did discover a bug in the version of 2048 running on my iPhone 5S with a newish iOS.

(I’ll later edit this post to include the exact version number of the game, if available, on my phone. Edit —per the description in the App Store, it is version 2.1 by Ketchapp released 29-Jan-2018.)

Before I describe the bug, take a look at this imgur screenshot.

If you look carefully, you will realize that at this point, the game is about to end. My only legal move is to move the top row left or the left most column up. In the first case, the newly opened slot will be adjacent to [64,8] on the top right and next to [8,2048] on the bottom in the second case.

The bug goes like this — if you swipe either of the two options towards the currently open slot and then quickly swipe in the opposite direction, the game will give you a 2- or 4-tile in the slot which is currently open.

Of course, this bug can be exploited at any point in the game and not just when you are about to die.

Originally published at ramachandr.in on March 11, 2018.