A simple math game created by a 19-year-old Italian web developer has spread all around the world, and Nashoba!

The developer,  Gabriele Cirulli, is nineteen years old and Italian. It’s he who needs to be thanked – or maybe not – for this new trending game.

The game’s name is 2048 and the objective is to slide tiles on a grid to combine them, and create a tile with the number 2048. One starts with two tiles in random spots, the game goes on until all the spots are occupied. After reaching the target score, players can continue beyond that. When there are no empty spaces and no adjacent tiles with the same value, the game ends.

“It seems that this game does not involve too much math, but it actually does” said Lish Ventura, a junior at Nashoba “It is smart!”. Lish found out about the game when a friend was playing it “I asked him if I could try and since then i’m like addicted to it. I played for four hours straight one night”

The game was developed in March 2014 and had over 33 million plays on the first week. It is no surprise then, that people around Nashoba are spending a good amount of time staring intensely at their phones and calculating math strategies to get to the 2048 tile. I mean, while looking up information, I stumbled upon the official website and started playing it too. But, what makes it so addictive?

Even senior, Cecilia Burke, has been dragged into this abyss. “Everyone is like “Why do you play this game so much?” Well I don’t know” she laughed “It’s challenging, I guess. I am very competitive and I can compete against other people and myself at the same time – my high score is sitting there in the top right corner”.

Other people were interviewed and everyone said the same thing. Nobody knows why this game is so addictive; they all just started playing, and gave it another try, and then another, and another. Everyone who is introduced to 2048 by friends, realizes that this game is so simple and can be done without much thinking, so it’s a nice way to spend some time when you have nothing to do.

Casey Cole said that it was really “creative and something I would have never thought of”. Truth is though, that this game is a copy of another game called Threes, which has basically the same concept, but 2048 is much more successful.

People suggest not to download it, so that at least your social life won’t be totally destroyed or neglected. If you prefer, there’s also the Flappy 2048 option; enough said.