Daily 2048: one game a day with the same tiles for everyone

How the Daily works

• The same tiles for everyone. The date decides where each new tile lands and whether it is a 2 or a 4. Make the same moves as a friend and you will see exactly the same tiles.
• 300 moves. The game ends after 300 moves, or sooner if the board fills and nothing can move. A counter shows how many are left.
• Three undos, for everyone. Pro or not, every player gets the same three, so a Daily result cannot be bought.
• Biggest tile wins. Your result is the biggest tile on the board at the end, then your points.
• One go counts. Your first finished game is recorded. Play again for practice as often as you like; it never changes the result.
• New tiles at midnight. A new Daily starts at midnight in your own time zone.

A Daily takes three or four minutes, which is the point: a whole game of 2048 is around a thousand moves, far too long for a morning coffee. Three hundred moves is enough to build something and short enough to come back to every day.

How everyone gets the same tiles

Normal 2048 picks each new tile at random. The Daily uses a random number generator started from the day's date, and keeps its state inside the game. So the first tile, the second tile and every tile after come out the same for everyone who plays the same moves on that date.

Make a different move and the board changes, so later tiles land in different places. That is what makes it a fair contest: you all start from the same board with the same luck on offer, and what you do with it decides the result.

It also means an undo cannot re-roll your luck. Take a move back and make the same move again and the same tile appears in the same square. What an undo can do is let you pick a different direction.

What is a good Daily result?

Each move adds a 2 or a 4, about 2.2 on average, and merges never add value. After 300 moves, the tiles on the board add up to only about 660. So a 1024 can't be reached within the move limit: it would need far more 4s than ever come. A 256 is a good day and a 512 is the best there is, and the points decide between everyone who makes the same tile.

For a sense of scale, the game's own computer player, which follows the corner strategy and looks a couple of moves ahead, ends its Dailies on a 512 with about 4,500 to 4,800 points.

How to plan 300 moves

In a normal game you can afford a few loose moves. In the Daily every move is one of only 300, and the 512 has to be finished before they run out. In full games the game's own careful computer player makes its first 512 somewhere between move 240 and move 280, so there is little to spare.

1. Corner from move one. Pick a corner before your first swipe and keep your biggest tile there. The corner strategy wastes the fewest moves.
2. One building site. Every tile you build should end up in the 512. A 64 stranded on the far side of the board is 64 of your 660 that will never count.
3. Watch the counter around move 220. If your 256 and the tiles below it can't add up to a second 256 in the moves left, switch to scoring: make every merge you can.
4. Finish merged. Points come only from merges, so on the last 20 moves merge whatever pairs you can. A board that ends with 512, 64, 32 scores more than one that ends with 512 and a scatter of 4s and 8s.
5. Keep the undos for slips. Three is enough to rescue a thumb that swiped the wrong way, not to replay the game.

Streaks, sharing and putting it on your site

The Daily sheet in Yuzool's 2048 shows your streak of days in a row, how many Dailies you have played and your best tile. Share sends a short card with the Daily's number, your tile, points and moves, and your streak, but never the board, so nobody gets a spoiler. Teachers, clubs and bloggers can also put today's Daily on their own page with a copy-and-paste code from puzzles for your website: it changes by itself every day and has no adverts.