tui48

tui48 is a clone of the popular single-player sliding tile puzzle video game orginally developed by Gabriele Cirulli. Instead of using a GUI, it is a TUI application -- that is, a "Text User Interface" app meant to be run in a terminal emulator.

I originally developed it after becoming dissatisfied with the poor responsiveness of a touchscreen implementation I was playing on a seatback infotainment system during an international flight. I realized "hey, this is simple enough that even I should be able to implement a clone!".

Installing

The best way to install and run this is to first install rust using rustup, then:

git clone https://github.com/waynr/tui48
cd tui48
cargo install --path ./

Note: this approach assumes you have the cargo install target directory included in your shell's PATH variable. If you don't then instead of running tui48 in your path, you will have to run <PATH_TO_TUI48>/target/debug/tui48

Running

Once installed, try running tui48 in your favorite terminal emulator!. I recommend alacritty, which what I prefer for my every day terminal usage and is the only terminal emulator I've tested it on. Here's how to do it:

If you do use a different terminal emulator, please let me know and report any bugs on this git repo's issue tracker!

Gameplay

The object of the game is to repeatedly combine like tiles to produce their sum value. For example, if two 2 tiles are side-by-side and the player slides the board left or right then those two tiles combine into a 4. Likewise, 4 and 4 produce 8, 8 and 8 produce 16, and so on.

Each time a pair of tiles is combined, the pre-combination face value of those tiles is added to the score. For example, if 32 and 32 are combined the score increases by 32 points.

The game ends when no moves are possible -- that is, when all tile positions on the board are filled and slides are not possible in any direction because no two tiles with like value are adjacent to one another.

The object of the game is to produce a tile with a value of 2048, but tui48 will allow the player to continue as far as they can to produce higher values -- 4096, 8192, etc.

Controls

q

Quit the current game and restore the terminal buffer to its pre-game state

h / left arrow

slide tiles left

j / down arrow

slide tiles down

k / up arrow

slide tiles up

l / right arrow

slide tiles right