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Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

You know, I wonder if we're about to see another tetris phenomenon. One of the miracles of tetris is that the game mechanics scaled from a few dots on an 80s era LCD keychain game to HDTV and surround sound.

Some kind of generalized 2048 game, with different or harder goals every "level" and some tweaked mechanics and we could see another one.

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After thinking about 2048 a lot while making and refining the 2048-AI program [1], I don't think that will happen in its current form. The game has a perfect level of complexity to be engaging and interesting to newcomers, but it can be completely mastered with just a little bit of knowledge and practice. And now that the game has been out for a bit, the optimal strategies are pretty well known and easy to discover [2]. Of course, it will still be appealing to people who choose to learn it on their own, but it's certainly possible to master the game in under an hour with some help, unlike classics like tetris. In order to give the game good replayability, it will at least need some new twists like timed moves or adversarial AI or something.

[1] http://ov3y.github.io/2048-AI/ [2] http://stackoverflow.com/q/22342854/1056032

I wonder if, instead of new blocks randomly showing up after you make a move, if they just showed up after a period of time. If a new block showed up right on top of an old one some kind of rule would take effect, like add them together, or the larger wins or something. As "levels" progressed, the rate these new blocks showed up would increase. The goal would probably have to be changed, instead of just getting to 2048, get to, or exceed, or come in just under some arbitrary number for the level or something.

Might add new strategy elements to the basic idea. You might not want to make a move, hoping the next blocks add to a block that's already on the board...maybe even "hint" where the next blocks will appear, but not the value. Tetris after all shows you the next block that will appear.

Someone should create a 2048/Tetris hybrid. Match the numbers into blocks as they fall to complete larger blocks. Talk about a challenge.

This sounds like an awesome game. It might be my weekend project. I'll let you know if it happens.

Rad, looking forward to the mind explosions.

Yeah, it is as simple as changing every single mention of 2048 in the source code to 4096. My friend actually tried that and it was... a lot harder than 2048. (The 2048-AI fails to make 4096 for most games, for example.)

https://github.com/youknowone/4096

You probably need a way to correlate the board size with the goal number

whats wrong with the current size?

http://i.imgur.com/IyzOmjn.png

regarding term2048, it’s as simple as:

    from term2048.game import Game
    Game(goal=4096).loop()

By replacing the numbers with colors you could scale it down to a pixel per piece. The tones would have to be chosen carefully, though.

A straightforward hue/rainbow progression might work. You need 11 colors to represent 2^1..2^11, so you could do {red, yellow, green, blue, magenta} * {normal, bright}, with 2048 as cyan.

Funny, I've actually been working on this today with rainbow shades and sounds on a modified board (with levels) and a more "child friendly" UI.

I'd like to see a version that has a slightly bigger grid. So apparently there is a market for alterations.

I wrote a clone with a configurable grid size.

https://bitbucket.org/ElwinR/ipv4-defrag

I decided to give it a network admin theme, but don't be fooled, it's really the same game.

I opened an issue to add different layouts for the UI.

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