How do you score a simple time-waster mobile game? If I'm going by how effectively it wasted my time, it's a 5/5. If I'm scoring it by how much fun it actually was, it's a 2.5/5. So we'll call it somewhere in the middle.

2048 is an app that I had to delete from my phone because I was sinking too much time into it while gaining nothing from the experience. And then I installed it again a year later. And deleted it. And then I downloaded it once more for a long trip. Then finally deleted it a third time a week later.

2048 is addictive gaming perfected. It's just barely a puzzle, and is really more about organization skills than anything else. I've been near-obsessive about organization from a very young age (hence the countless hours I've sunk into Backloggd), so I was the perfect mark for these habit-forming squares.

If you really want to try it, all you really have to do is keep your big number in the same corner the entire time, and do everything you can to move the lesser numbers towards it so values decrease the farther you go from your big number. But once you hit 2048, call it. Quit. Delete the app and never look back.

Or one day you might realize you've sunk dozens of hours into a never-ending 8x8 version of the game simply because you get dopamine spikes from a feeling of progression while seeing numbers grow.

This game is genius. It hooked me. I kind of hate it.