Puzzle Games

Puzzle games ask you to see a structure that is not drawn on the screen. In 2048 that structure is an ordering: the moment you understand that the board must stay sorted along one edge, your best score roughly doubles. Before that insight, the game looks like luck.

What makes a good browser puzzle is that a run is short enough to retry immediately and deterministic enough that you can tell which move lost it. That feedback loop is why 2048 spread the way it did in 2014 — every loss teaches you something specific about the move that caused it.