Adventure Memory Match

How to play Adventure Memory Match

Memory match — also called concentration or pairs — is the game where every card lies face down and you turn two at a time, trying to find matching pairs. Turn two that match and they stay up. Turn two that do not and they flip back, and the only thing you keep is the memory of what was where.

There is no timer pushing you and no way to lose. The score is the number of turns you took, so the whole game is a trade between flipping quickly and remembering carefully.

The rules

Tap any face-down card to turn it over, then tap a second. If the two faces match, the pair stays face up and is out of play. If they do not, both turn back over after a moment and you try again. The board is cleared when every pair has been found.

A turn is counted each time you reveal a second card, whether or not it matched. Matching every pair in the fewest turns is the thing to aim at — a perfect game on the eight-pair board is eight turns, which needs luck as well as memory.

Choosing a difficulty

Five sizes are on offer, and the jump between them is bigger than it looks. Each extra pair adds two cards to remember and roughly doubles the chance that a card you have seen once has slipped away again.

• Easy — 8 pairs. Sixteen cards. A warm-up, and the right size for a young child.
• Medium — 10 pairs. Twenty cards. Still comfortably inside what most people can hold.
• Hard — 18 pairs. Thirty-six cards, and the point where a system starts to beat guesswork.
• Expert — 24 pairs. Forty-eight cards. You will be relying on position, not on the picture.
• Grand Master — 50 pairs. A hundred cards. Long, and genuinely difficult.

Two card sets

The Adventure deck is hand-drawn fantasy artwork — potions, blades, creatures and treasure — illustrated for this site by KaruWorks. It is the one to play if you want the game to look like something.

The Symbols deck is a large set of plain, brightly coloured shapes. It is less pretty and much easier to tell apart quickly, which is why the biggest boards need it: fifty distinct pieces of artwork is more than the eye can sort at a glance, and fifty distinct symbols is not.

Getting better at it

Most people play memory by flipping more or less at random and hoping. A little structure beats that badly.

• Work left to right. Turning cards in a fixed order means the position of a card is something you learned rather than something you have to reconstruct.
• Name what you see. "Red potion, second row, third in" is far stickier than a picture you glanced at. Saying it under your breath genuinely works.
• Spend your first turns buying information. Early on almost nothing matches, so the point of those turns is to see cards, not to score. Turn over cards you have never seen rather than re-checking one you half remember.
• Cash in the moment you know. If you are certain of a pair, take it. Leaving it on the board to "use later" only gives you more to hold.

On a phone

The board reflows to whatever the screen can fit, so a phone gets a tall, narrow grid and a desktop a wide one. The game is identical either way — only the shape of the layout changes — so a Grand Master board is just as playable on a phone, if rather a lot of scrolling.

A game in progress is saved on your own device. Close the tab, come back later, and the board is where you left it.

Common questions

Does the game keep my best score?

Yes, the fewest turns you have taken at each difficulty, stored in your browser on your own device. Nothing is uploaded and there is no account.

Can I lose?

No. There is no time limit and no penalty for a wrong turn, so every game ends with the board cleared. The only question is how many turns it took.

Is the board different every time?

Yes. The cards are shuffled fresh for every game, so neither the pairs nor their positions carry over.