It has a rhythm like you're casually sweeping up.
Isn't it horrible? My high is 15532, because clearly I should be writing a conference paper.
If you're looking for another good waste of time, this little documentary about Marquette's basketball uniforms is totally captivating. Apparently one of their players wanted to study fashion design and the coach agreed to get him into classes at the local women's college and make all the uniforms he designed for the team until they were made illegal. Lots there about what cool interesting guys the coach and players of that era were, plus incredible jerseys.
And there's more chance involved than I first realized, but it's pleasingly easy to get an intuitive strategy going.
Into a corner works really well. If you can get the high number into the top left, and create a full line at the top with the biggest numbers, and then mostly up-left in the bottom three, you can marry them pretty easily up to the 1024 stage. I can't get past that.
That game is fun. This one is too. Very popular among my planning friends, as you might expect.
Because Unfogged and video games on their own aren't work-avoiding enough. Sigh. 5240 with the 512 piece so far.
I got up to 256 first time out. Then I just mashed the keys really fast and I got up to 128.
First try got 12476 with the high tile being 1024. I'm pretty convinced that if a certain 2 showed up on the other side (of 2 options), then I would've won.
I won, after an evening of playing. This is the kind of game that makes me completely lose track of time (apparently I played for 30min at one point, and was convinced it had been no more than 5min). Still: very fun.
I won, after an evening of playing. This is the kind of game that makes me completely lose track of time (apparently I played for 30min at one point, and was convinced it had been no more than 5min). Still: very fun.
He ripped off Threes and put up the clone for free? I guess that's life, but what an asshole.
Yeah, if you like it, you may want to buy Threes instead. You'll get Halford points for doing so.
Third try score of 17080 with high tile of 1024 again.
This is somewhat easier than threes, but I can't put my finger on why.
Oh god the kids woke up waaaaay too early and I am way too cranky for another day trapped in a car. This is in fact closely related to the OP.
5 times in a row now I've gotten a high tile of 1024. Just can't seem to line things up enough to get to 2048. Guh!
Lots there about what cool interesting guys the coach and players of that era were, plus incredible jerseys
Thanks for this, AWB. Al McGuire was a hero of mine back when I followed basketball, for things of which this is typical. I wrote several weeks ago about having lost all interest in the game, which has got me thinking about having another look. I hear there may be some tournaments starting...
Damn you, heebie! I had work to do tonight.
I just played it for the first time and was on my phone. In that interface it was not even clear how the move rules worked (I've never played Threes), but it kept going for a while.
I also got to 256 my first time out. Then I stopped.
If you're currently masturbating to Fred Phelps, you should hurry.
I believe I've posted it here before, but my favorite Al McGuire moment was from when he was a color commentator during the NCAAs; someone made a great move down the lane and he came out with "You can tell by the way I walk, I'm ladies man no time to talk." To the confusion of his broadcast partner. The real deal, to which annoying wannabes like Dick Vitale futilely aspire.
23: I'm pretty sure I've seen video of "satanists" (art school students?) fucking on his mother's grave.
Another side story from that Marquette team was the US only squeaking by Puerto Rico 95-94 at the Montreal Olympics in 1976. Marquette player Butch Lee was from New York but had born in Puerto Rico. He had not gotten a try-out with the US team (actual college players in those days) and ended up playing for Puerto Rico and had a terrific game against the US (who other than the controversial '72 loss to the Soviets) were absolutely dominant at the time. (78-1 in Olympic play through 1976).
I am worse than random at the game. I did better on the phone when I was clueless.
24: 60 Minutes is really scrambling for ratings.
Spamming down-left-down-left with some occasional right-lefts thrown in when necessary works quite well. Made it to 2048 a couple times in a row.
Every game so far I've gotten to 1024, but can't quite pull off a win. Sigh.
I suck. I can only rarely get to 1024 and sometimes I don't make it to 512. Closest I got was one 1024 and one 512 piece, then at which point luck caught up to me and my carefully arranged board went haywire.
omg I just spent 90 minutes doing this wtf
"satanists" (art school students?)
Eh, six of one, half dozen of another.
I'm worse than teraz -- I'm really having trouble figuring out any kind of strategy.
I'm annoyed that on my first game I got 128, second 256, third 512, then I started getting caught up and devising strategies and now I can't even get to 256 most of the time.
Ha! Finally got 2048!! It only took 7 or 8 tries....now I can go waste time in some other manner. Or go to bed. Or something...
OMG--I've been playing this for 10 straight hours!! WTF!!!
I came into my office today determined to get a bunch of things done and I just wasted 20 minutes playing that stupid game.
Heebie is history's greatest monster.
I am somehow immune to this game's addictive powers, but it's made me recall the Dolphin Game, linked in this comment. So now I'm fighting the urge to play with flying dolphins.
Now I want to see if the one with the penguin and the bat is still online.
Given how late I stayed up with it last night, I am immensely grateful to Heebie for posting it on a weekend.
I can imagine having a conscious strategy like the ones outlined above, but I can't imagine successfully implementing it. I get too caught up in instinct and in repeating movements when possible (which is probably unhelpful, and indeed I reach 256 consistently and 512 often while hardly going higher).
I am somehow immune to this game's addictive powers
You and me both. I've have to take Ritalin to play it more than a couple times.
This seems easier than Threes, which is positively devilish. (But adorbs!)
I played it once, got up to 512. I won't be playing again. It would be too easy to pour hours into that thing.
Speaking of games, this Lego robot kills (at Rubik's cube).
2048 tile with 25,824 points.
SPOILER WARNING. AWB's hint was key for me. To get from 1024 to 2048 I needed a large dose of luck and the realization that you want the size to zig-zag onto the second row. That is if your highest tile is in the upper *left* and then decreasing along the first row, you want to have your largish tiles on the *right* of the second row. Now that I say it, it's kind of obvious, but it took me a while to figure it out.
4096! This game is probably the most fun I've ever had.
It's what I had been waiting for, all these long years.
all my time. now gone. I don't know whether I hate you or love you now HG
I clicked cursor arrows a few times, didn't know what was going on, and closed the window because my attention span is at this point on a scale beneath what we can understand.
||
Grand Budapest Hotel is an oddball masterpiece, I think.
|>
Smearcase has the attention span of an ancient Egyptian.
recall the Dolphin Game
Oh, man! I loved that. Did we also see Fantastic Contraption come through here? I'm forgetting.
I learned from the SplashBack and Bloxorz games linked here years ago that I enjoy games where you have something like a set of puzzles to solve more than games where you see how far you can get or high you can score. Although I guess 2048 is a goal.
I played once, on a tablet, was never sure how the board generates new numbers, got to a 512 piece and some 128 and 256 pieces, haven't played again.
There's more animated cleavage in the Star Wars cartoon than I expected.
58: It's old now but you might like the Flash version of Portal.
1024. Which I got by abandoning any thought of overarching strategy, and just play one or two moves ahead. I'm done now.
Are we ready to move on to mcconnelling now?
I finally won at 2048. I didn't get a trophy or anything; it just said I could keep playing if I wanted to. I'm very proud of myself.
I played just squishing numbers around and got 1104. Then I made Bave explain to me why the numbers were being assholes or rather what was the nature of their assholicity, and I played with a lot more intent squinching of my brow, and got 1396.
63: I'll see your froggy style and raise you screaming goats.
67: I'd seen the screaming goat thing, and I'd seen the mcconnelling thing, but I hadn't really seen anything until I saw them finally joined together.
I don't have a really principled strategy here, but I've gotten in the 5000's a few times. However, this dumb algorithm consistently gets at least 1000 (last two tries got 1380 and 1108): Start at state A.
A: Hold right until it stops doing anything. Go to B.
B: Hold up until it stops doing anything. Go to A unless holding up will also have no effect; then go to C.
C: Press left once. Go to B.
There definitely does seem to be a level where if I play where more intent I do much worse.
You need some kind of strategy that
1. Prioritizes consolidation.
2. Prioritizes directions in a sequence, like right and then up.
3. Prioritizes consolidation based on value--like consolidating in the direction that maximizes value, or consolidate in the direction that maximizes the number of small numbers consolidates.
4. Does some kind of look ahead, like if you see a sequence of two that consolidates in a way that maximizes based on the other criteria, do that.
2nd game of actually knowing the rules: 3084. I feel like I am learning a skill except I am clearly not learning a skill.
This strategy got me 3660: alternate between up and right when you can't do either, do left once then go back to alternating, starting on up.
Dalriata's strategy just got me to 3212, breaking my previous high of around 3100.
I'm actually thinking I should go to bed.
Actually thinking things through, I got to 12188. My basic rule was: pick a direction, let's say down. Never move in that direction. Try to populate an entire row at the top, ideally in increasing order to one direction. Then you can maneuver pieces in the next row into the first row as necessary to combine. If you've been careful to put them in order (which can be done by preferring one of the two orthogonal directions, say right, over the other), that should make it easy to combine big pieces.
Then you just have to be careful to make it a priority to fill up the top row whenever you clear something out of it. This might not be sufficient for end game play.
74: So make it like Tetris, basically. I just tried that approach and got the 1024 tile and a total score of 13716, which is way better than I had done before.
That's the same approach I've been taking and it works great to get 512 consistently and 1024 sometimes so my score tends to be either in the 7-9000 range or the 12-15000 range. But it doesn't get me any further than that. I'm not sure if it's just a better dead end or whether all it needs is some tweaking.
Yeah, basically like tetris, or as close to it as you can come. I was able to get a 1024, a 512, and a 256 for a score of 15456 but couldn't quite finish it.
I won! Fucking finally. Now I can get some work done.
Commenting in this thread led me to make another two attempts, both of which were pathetic failures, despite getting 512 tiles each time. The scores were much ower than on my first attempt.
Unfoggetarian's "spoiler" in 48 fixed my game for me. Fill the top line with biggest, next, next, and next. Then, moving the second line gradually to the right, add to the smallest number on the top line, adding those left as they're able to be combined.
Be sure to keep your biggest number in the upper left corner. If you're pretty far along and that gets messed up, start over.
My collaborator's 5 year old got 2384 on his first game.
Lots of great stuff in this thread (including an AI that's very good at this game, and an ultrahard version of the game): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22342854/
27968 / 2048. Thanks for the hints. I hereby swear not to play this game anymore.
In case you need a distraction from this horrible horrible game: http://www.diyphotography.net/beautiful-photos-cocks-taken-beauty-pageant/
That was good and the url was great.
Using the described strategy got me up to 1024. I figure another few weeks of concerted effort and I can stop playing this one.
I played this game on the drive for so long that when I looked up to look at traffic, it looked like you should be able to shove the cars and have them absorb into each other.
Finally! 2048 tile, with a final score of 20,808. Using AWB's strategy, mostly, but there was one point where I had to move down because the top three rows were all filled, with an empty fourth row. Took a while to maneuver back to the decreasing values in the top row, but made it.
I've been restricting myself to playing 5-6 games per day, which feels about right, and AWB's hint was helpful.
I've been able to get up to 512, but not above that.
Also, the game is mentioned in today's xkcd.
Because I'm more obsessive than any of you, I won a game, and then decided to find out if I could win consistently. I'm at about one out of three, but there are dumb mistakes in there -- I think more accurate play would probably get me up to two out of three, and it might be winnable every time.
Highest number in one corner, build numbers decreasing in size along that side, and then once you've got 1024, 512, 256, 128 stacked, all you need to do is build one last 128 in the row below and you're done.
(which is AWB's strategy, obviously. Until I read that, I was lost.)
Now try this one:
I hate you all.
The doge one is so much harder since I haven't been learning doge values since childhood.
94: Violating the sanctity of off-blog violations of the sanctity of other people's screens, I can attest that when dal brought out his phone his interest in the 2048 game was "revealed." (I did note it out loud at the time, so I was actively rather than secretly snooping which would be much creepier*.)
*Actually, this is one screen your boss can recognize from way across the room.
In the future all memes will have associated dogememes.
97,98 I think I got that from tierce's twitter feed. So playing. Much time.
99: Ha, I thought about bringing that up but EMBARRASSING.
100: doge :: meme -> meme
There have been previous meme functions because I've made that joke before...yo dawg, maybe?
103.2,3: My examples are making lightbulb or "cross the road" jokes.
103.1: We're here to embarrass those unable or unwilling to embarrass themselves. Maybe we should post a trigger warning to that effect (at least for the meetups).
Is anybody still playing this game? I feel an absurd sense of accomplishment at finally reaching the 4096 tile (final score 52,356).
Maybe now I can get back to work.
Dammit, I was trying to do that.
Thank you both for validating my fixation. Also: 80,600 points, and I was damned close to the 8192! I had:
512 - 1024 - 2048 - 4096
128 - 256 - XXX - XXX
and just couldn't quite get another 128 to start the third row (got a 16 and 32 next to each other, so I was a few good breaks away). Sigh.
I had never heard of the doge thing before and was embarrassingly connecting it with Venice.
I added the website for this game to my block list to keep myself from playing it. I still sneak in sometimes, but I've never gotten past the 1048 brick 9000 point mark.
108: Wow! that's seriously impressive. It'll be a while before I get close to that.
110: Hrm, good idea, I should probably do that, too.
111 was me. My highest score is still that in comment 94.
I'd been avoiding 2048 until today, but aaaagh. Finally got to the 2048 tile, using awb's strategy.