2048 Coach
Learn the patterns behind the mythic square.
Plain 2048 until the board gets tight. Then a coach names the pattern in front of you, says which way to go, and tells you afterward if you missed it. Swipe on a phone, arrow keys on a desktop. Five drills at the bottom set up the positions that decide games.
The patterns
Hold the corner
Pick one corner and keep the biggest tile there for the whole game. Two directions press into it, one slides along the wall, and one lifts it out. The coach flags the lift before you take it.
Free move
When the wall is full, sliding away from the corner cannot move it. That is the move to use when the two safe directions do nothing.
Trapped tile
A 2 or 4 pinned between big tiles on the wall blocks every merge past it. Build its twin above it and merge it out before the board fills.
Spawn trap
Every move is followed by a random 2 or 4. A move that leaves one open spot with no merge next to it can lose the game on that spawn. The coach reports the odds.
Chain merge
Two or three merges in one swipe, or a merge that lines a tile up with its neighbour on the wall. Space is the resource. Chains buy the most of it.
Tight board
Below the open spot threshold every move counts. The coach ranks all four directions by a short search and shows why each one wins or loses room.
How the coach decides
Every board is searched two to three moves deep with the random spawns averaged in, the same expectimax idea the strong 2048 bots use, under a 40ms budget so it feels the same on a phone.
A criticality score from 0 to 1 blends open spots, the chance a move leaves a dead board, whether the corner is at risk, and how far apart the best and second best moves are. In auto mode a hint shows at 0.5.
After each move the coach compares what you played to what it would have played on the same board. A miss gets one line and an undo, so the pattern gets a second look while it is still on the screen.