Memory Match

The board, and how you win

Cards are laid out face down in a grid. They come in pairs, so the number of cards is always even, and you win when every pair has been found and the whole board is face up.

There is no game over. Every board can be finished; the only question is how many attempts it takes you.

• Cards are card-shaped rather than square tiles, and the back is the same woven pattern the Solitaire deck uses, in this game’s own colour.
• The faces are symbols — shapes drawn by the app. No letters, no numbers, no photographs, because text baked into a picture cannot be translated.
• Shape comes first and colour second. No pair is told apart by colour alone.
• A screen reader names a symbol by number — "symbol 3" — rather than by shape name, because a shape name would need translating in every language the app ships.

Flipping cards

• Tap a face-down card and it turns face up.
• The moment the second card turns over, that counts as one move.
• A match stays face up for good.
• A miss also stays face up. The two cards turn back only when you tap the next face-down card, and that card becomes the first of your next move.
• Tapping a card that is already face up does nothing — whether it is matched, the first card of this move, or one of the two still showing from a miss.

Your move count is shown while you play; it is this game’s own measure and it does not hurry you. No clock is shown. The time is recorded and appears when you finish and in your statistics.

A missed pair does not turn itself back over

Most versions of this game flip a missed pair back after a second or two. This one waits for you instead, and that is a deliberate choice rather than an oversight.

Letting the device decide how long you may look is the opposite of not hurrying you, and it would need a timer running during play — which this app avoids everywhere, for the battery as much as for the tone. Looking away is always your action.

The three board sizes

• There is one difficulty slot. Starting a different size replaces the game you had in progress, and the app asks before it does.
• There is no level ladder. A memory game does not get deeper by being repeated a few hundred times, so a climb of levels would be padding rather than content.
• Statistics are kept per size: games played, games cleared, fewest moves, fastest time and total play time.
• The layout comes from a seed, so the same seed always deals the same board.

The board is sized to the smallest of four limits — the screen width, a cap for tablets, the height left after the top bar and the ad slot, and a cap on a single card. Cards being card-shaped makes a board taller than a square-tile one would be, so leaving space at the sides is correct: it keeps the tap targets big enough on a small phone.

The daily board

• One board a day, the same for every player.
• It is always 4×5, the medium size. No weekday is harder than another.
• The last 30 days stay open, so a day you missed is still there to play. Clearing one records how many moves it took.
• No streak is counted or shown, so nothing is lost by skipping a day.
• The daily and the size you chose are held in separate slots, so one never overwrites the other.

When a saved game is restored, cards that were face up but not yet matched come back face down. Whether you still remembered them is not something the device can know, and turning them back over is the honest version.

Why there is no Undo or Hint

Both are unlimited and free in most of this collection. Here they are absent, and for reasons specific to what this game is made of.

• Undo would be a lie. What you flipped, you saw. Rolling the board and the move count back does not roll back what you now know, so the button would claim to undo something it cannot touch.
• Hint would be the game. Pointing at where a pair is does not help you remember — it does the remembering for you, and there is nothing left underneath.
• What you get instead is a retry of the same layout, instantly and as often as you like. What you memorised carries into the next attempt, which in a memory game is exactly what getting better looks like.
• And the second help is the rule above: a missed pair stays visible until you move on.

Questions people ask