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Comment by antr | Hacker News Reader

I'm genuinely addicted to this. I'd be very happy to pay $5 for a native 2048 iOS game – this will substitute my Flipboard use during my commute.

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Have you tried Threes? It has a very similar gameplay

http://asherv.com/threes/

There's Threes (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/threes!/id779157948?mt=8) which is similar but not the same (since it requires a 1 and a 2 to generate a 3, which makes it slightly more troublesome. I prefer powers of 2, too, they appeal my inner nerd.

Some important differences: * the first step is explicitly 1 + 2 = 3 (which you mentioned), 1+1 and 2+2 do NOT add * You move all tiles a single space at once, rather than 'to the edge'. Note tiles only merge when they push together, so an edge or other cards restricting their movement. This is a side effect design decision of single space moving. I do not know if two pairs will merge, e.g. will 3 + 3 + 6 + 6 leave 6 + 12? I suspect it will, but I haven't seen it. * Numbers 1 and 2 both spawn, and there is a 'next number' indicator, although placement still appears random. (A 3 spawned in the tutorial, but I think that was a special case)

Overall this leads to a very different feel to the game.

Anything else I missed?

3 + 3 + 6 + 6 can't make 6 + 12 because the tiles can only move one step. The ones near the edge will merge first (depending with way you push it).

Thx. I have just bought it, $3. Its almost the same idea, with slightly different mechanics. The 2048 animations are much "better" imho.

Yeah, after Threes, 2048 felt a little easier, though. Enjoy Threes, I already thing it was well worth it: real moment killer without being excessively mindless

There's Even on Android (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.prasio.eve...) which uses powers of 2. It's really addictive!

What would this offer over the official version other than "doesn't take up a tab in MobileSafari" (which could be fixed if the developer just added the right meta tags)?

- Play offline

- Save game

- Save score

- Better UX (e.g. right now I need to refresh to start a new game) not UI and a bunch of other obvious stuff relevant to all native apps.

> - Play offline - Save game - Save score

I don’t know what is Mobile Safari support for these, but you can play 2048 in your browser without Internet connection once you downloaded the page, and you can save game/scores in localStorage.

The new "best score" feature is saved in localStorage, so that's now already covered. While the existing app doesn't cover all of your other use cases, those have nothing to do with being native, and you could even download the HTML and fix some of them yourselves in a few minutes: adding a cache manifest (three line text file and one attribute in the HTML) would make fully-offline possible (and when combined with the aforementioned meta tag, gives a pretty native experience, as the app at this point would work without Internet access, with its own icon and its own entry in the multitasking list). It would also be trivial to implement saving games with the web implementation, probably an addition 20 lines of JS (although the length of the game is capped, so I'm surprised you want this). As for having to reload to start a new game, I'm surprised that that matters to you: but adding a "new game" button (that could just reload the page, which would be instantaneous with the cache manifest) would also be trivial. Like, if you are willing to spend $5 on this, maybe you'd be willing to spend 15 minutes? ;P

Have you considered adding the original 2048 website to your homescreen as a webapp? Works like a charm to me.

This is what I see on my iPhone when opening the site after saving it as a webapp http://cl.ly/image/0h2E1Y0h2O11

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