It's so hard to tell sometimes but I'd hypothesise a few reasons:

1. It's really simple-looking and uncluttered

2. It's an easy game to understand the rules of

3. You can get a real sense of achievement early in the game

4. It's hard to finish the game on the first go

I clicked on the link because it looked like "Year 2048". Future is always interesting.

HN titles are so misleading.

Same here.

I was hooked to the game and continued playing it for 2 hours non stop, AT WORK. It's addictive. I could not reach the magic figure, but the experience was great.

People like challenges, so if it's simple (Braid) but one of those endless games (Flappy bird), it's more likely to hit. And be useful to monetize: ads, ads for your real games and virtual currency.

2048 author: put some unobstrusive ads on that shit, dude, you're losing ton$ of ca$h.

What is this obsession everybody has with ads these days?

They are ruining media. Even "unobstrusive ads" are doing a lot of harm by collecting user habbits etc without any authorisation.

Have you seen Daring fireball?

Really good question. I haven't seen something stay on the top spot of the front page for this long in a while.

1. It naturally has a great difficulty curve.

2. It feeds right into the kind of logic and algorithms that people on hacker news find so intriguing.

3. It's very easy to pick up how to play and share with others.

For me, it was because it gave small bits of satisfaction (merging two numbers) with a challenge that wasn't too steep nor too boring.

It was posted to HN on a weekend, readers have more time to waste, so fun stuff is more likely to be updated.

I see that thread when it has already 1000+ points. So I think that must be fun, and I add my little 1 point.

It is simple to understand and play, and yet very hard to to solve the puzzle, hence making it addictive.

It is fun, easy to look at, and kind of geeky. Just like HN.

Because it's fun and challenging.