Screenshot by Eric Mack / CNET

Have you been feeling just a little bit too productive since Flappy Bird got pulled from the Google Play and Apple App stores?

Never fear, there's a new simple but addictive gaming sensation to fill that massive time-wasting vacuum until Flappy Bird's anticipated return.

2048, the creation of a 19-year-old Italian programmer named Gabriele Cirulli, showed up free and fully open-sourced on Github earlier this month. The game is Web-based, although a mobile site is also available, and plenty of unofficial ports for Android and other platforms have begun to pop up.

2048 could be loosely described as similar to Threes, or like Candy Crush for math geeks, and while it's tough to understand what's happening at first glance, it only takes a minute to pick up the game and then you're off on the road to procrastination-enabling addiction.

Cirulli debuted the game on March 9. Three days later he tweeted that thousands of people were playing the game at one moment:

28000 people playing #2048game right now. The amount of man-hours spent playing this game will never be returned to humanity. — Gabriele Cirulli (@gabrielecirulli) March 12, 2014

By March 16, Cirulli estimated that collectively over 520 years had been spent playing the game in its first week online. Still, he said he has no plans to monetize his game and warns against downloading imitation apps, claiming that some developers have been impersonating him on the Google Play store to boost downloads.

Of course, the 2048 story doesn't end there. The parade of variants is in full swing, from Doge2048 as seen above to this ego-boosting version, a multi-player take, a headache-inducing 3D 2048, an even-more addicting Tetris mashup, and potentially the greatest time assassin of them all, a Flappy Bird-themed 2048 game.

I don't recommend clicking on anything in the above paragraph. It could be your last click of the day until you pass out at your keyboard. You've been warned.