2048: Play it When You're Late

Image from gotgame.com

Jigsaw Meets Sudoku

Game Review By Joey D. Bidan Jr.

            Ever since Sudoku became a household name as the ultimate brain game, there are other number games that attempt to modify the rules, gameplay and design of Sudoku to keep up with its worldwide popularity. The Japanese were still the ones who were good at inventing such games. For instance, “Kakuro” and “Hitori” where in the Philippines, people like me loved playing them to kill time. If you haven’t heard of them yet and you want a few unique variations in the monotonous “number arrangement” scheme in your favorite Sudoku, better go check them out Kakuro has a math twist and Hitori is simple logic. They’re both available now in iOS and Android.

Image from play.google,com

            Speaking of Android, the latest craze in the smartphone community is “2048” (no, not the hotel room number) which I call as “the moving Sudoku”. For dummies who are still unaware of its existence, imagine a Sudoku board with its mini boxes but instead of writing down numbers in fixed positions inside them, you get the ability to push, pull or swipe them all around the board whichever direction you want (up, down, left, or right and no, you can’t move them in diagonals).

Image from geekswithjuniors.com

            You should’ve pictured it out by now why I called it as a “moving Sudoku” because for me, that’s how the gameplay really feels. It’s only similar to Sudoku at a glance but the rules to “survive” the game are different. The mechanics? Swipe the board so that the numbered (and colored) squares move altogether in the direction you chose. Numbers that are beside each other and the same combine into one (just like piling plates of the same sizes) such that 2 and 2 becomes 4, 4 and 4 becomes 8 and so on until it accumulates to a single square of 2048 and/or beyond (hence the name of the game). Pretty simple huh? But what happens to numbers that are not alike? Of course, they pile on top of each other to consume the empty unnumbered spaces on your board. And you don’t want that to happen since every time you swipe (regardless of direction), a single square of either 2 or 4 will appear. These new squares will keep on showing up and if you fail to combine more squares as you can to make more empty squares for them, you’ll run out of chance to move any square at all – an obvious Game Over!

            My strategy is to organize the numbers in such a way that it will be easy for me to add up those new numbers that appear until they pile into bigger ones. The way I do this is to make sure the biggest numbers are on top so I could freely move and add up the smaller ones below them.

            There are other variations to 2048 like “2 in 1” and “Threes!” which they say are more challenging since you have to pair a 1 and 2 first before starting to combine from 3’s, 9’s going up. There is also a version with an “undo” button so you could go back in time and reverse your mistake for a nonstop million points game! Whatever it is, 2048 will surely challenge your focus but not as much as “Flappybird” to make you throw your phone to pieces. It’s just the perfect time-killer.

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