The combo UI just doesn't work for me. I didn't understand what was happening until reading the blog post, the game just felt broken since it was inconsistent whether a piece maintained focus or not. And even after knowing about it, I was constantly making misplays due to clickin on a unit I wanted to move, and instead having the pre-selected unit capture the clicked unit.
It might be worth trying out a model where the combo piece is highlighted graphically, but you still need to first click on that unit first if you want to move it.
When the board is almost full, it's difficult to know which pieces can move. Perhaps add some green shade to the ones that can move.
- I noticed very late that the king will actually "kill" (or capture in chess terms) my pieces if "cornered". While this is a nice feature, even if it doesn't happen when the player is just one step away from losing, it still prolongs the game even more.
- I also noticed very late that I can win the game by capturing the king with a 1024 piece (in my case it was a queen). I only found out because I got into the habit of selecting all pieces in turn to check what moves were possible. I hope I'm not spoilering right now :)
- Would be nice if you could capture a screenshot of the final board without the "you win" overlay. I don't have a Twitter account and no, I'm not going to create one just for this game ;)
- Also would be nice if the score (maybe also the current highscore, like in 2048) would be shown somewhere during the game, not just at the end.
- One nice feature is that the game remembers the current state if you leave the browser tab open, so you can shut down your PC and return to it the next morning - badly needed also, because the games are really long...
Managed a score of 6,000 ish. What a nifty twist on a couple of old games.
Could the score be visible during the game to give a sense of the scoring rules? I didn't know the king eats pieces until I read the comments here... I would expect that to lose you points, but hard to tell unless the scoring is maybe documented somewhere I missed?
This was my game just before I stopped (the 1024 was next to the 256): https://ibb.co/gv0QR89
Or 600 MB as in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41459629
The first time I played I thought king would take my pieces with some probability if they weren't guarded. I spent way, way more effort than was necessary playing with higher stakes.
I should add I didn't expect to find the rules in the Post-mortem, so I gave up on that after skimming through the page and jumped right into the game.
Eg. Are new pieces random? Since the king can eat clutter does that prevent you from losing?
I hope you post again when you've made a standalone page and/or mobile versions, this game deserves lots of success :)
EDIT: Oh, a piece can merge with any piece that has the same numerical value. This makes the game far more playable.
How to play:
* Join forces
* Claim the throne
* Revel in glory
Two things, one on-topic and the other off-topic:
The thing which makes 2048 moderately easy to reason about is that incoming pieces are always "1". However, this game appears to spawn in random pieces, with random point values. I tried to follow the to-and-fro of the design blog in order to find out why this is, and I get the impression it's for avoiding getting the player stuck, but it does have the disadvantage of making planning incredibly hard. The good news is that by reading the blog I finally understood what was going on with the screen shake
off-topic: that "Subscribe to me blog" modal is not only bad UX (imho, of course), but also doubles down on the UX tire-fire by resetting my reading position to the top of the page. It's almost enough to warrant a command-w right there. Just one datum, but it for sure made me sad