9K Club Game: How Reach 9 Works

The board

Reach 9 is played on a 4x4 grid — sixteen squares, most of them empty when you start. Two tiles are on the board at the beginning, and each one shows a number. Every tile in the 9K Club game carries a number from 1 to 9, and the whole game is about climbing that ladder.

The four moves

There are only four things you can do: slide up, down, left or right. A slide moves every tile on the board in that direction at once, as far as it can go, until it hits a wall or another tile. Use the arrow keys or WASD on a computer, and swipe or the on-screen pad on a phone.

How merging works

When a slide pushes two tiles showing the same number into each other, they merge into a single tile showing the next number up. Two 1s become a 2. Two 2s become a 3. Two 8s become the 9 that finishes the ladder.

• A tile that was just created by a merge cannot merge again in the same slide.
• Three matching tiles in a row merge the pair closest to the wall you are sliding towards.
• Two 9s never merge — 9 is the end of the ladder.
• After any slide that actually changed something, one new tile appears in a random empty square.

Scoring

Points come from merges, and they double at every step of the ladder, so the late merges are where a score is really made.

On top of that, a slide that lands more than one merge pays a combo bonus of 25 points per extra merge. Club points — the third number on the scoreboard — tick up by one for every ten points scored, and unlike the score they carry across runs.

When a run ends

A run ends when the board is full and no two neighbouring tiles match, because at that point no slide can change anything. Reaching the 9 tile does not end the run: the club shows you the ladder is complete and you can keep sliding to push the score higher, or start a clean board.

Three habits that raise a score

1. Pick a corner and keep your biggest tile in it. Most lost boards are lost because the big tile wandered into the middle and split the grid in two.
2. Slide in three directions, not four. If your corner is bottom-left, use down, left and right, and treat up as an emergency move only.
3. Build a staircase. Keep the row along your chosen wall in descending order, so each merge feeds the next one and a single slide can chain several steps at once.

No money, anywhere

The 9K Club game is free and stays free. There is nothing to buy, no paid continues, no advantage for sale and no payment details collected. Club points are a score that lives in your browser; they cannot be bought, sold, transferred or exchanged for anything.