Memory Match

Memory Match is the card game most people know as Concentration or Pairs. All cards start face down. You turn over two at a time; if they show the same picture they stay up, and if they do not they flip back after a moment. Clear the whole board and you win.

Nothing about it is difficult to understand, which is what makes it a good test. The only thing standing between you and a perfect score is how much of the board you actually remembered while you were busy looking for something else.

Three sizes are available: 4×4 with 8 pairs for a quick round, 4×5 with 10 pairs, and 6×6 with 18 pairs where holding the board in your head genuinely stops being easy. Moves and elapsed time are both tracked, and your best result is stored separately for each size.

1. Choose a board size. The timer starts on your first flip, not when the board appears — take as long as you like to get comfortable.
2. Tap a card to turn it face up, then tap a second one. That counts as one move.
3. If the two match, both stay face up with a green border and the pair counter goes up. If not, both flip back after about seven tenths of a second — long enough to register, short enough not to drag.
4. Find every pair to finish. Your result is scored on moves first and time second.
5. A perfect game uses exactly as many moves as there are pairs. That is essentially impossible on 6×6, which is rather the point.

One control: click or tap a face-down card. Matched cards are disabled and cannot be flipped again, and inputs are ignored during the brief window when two unmatched cards are showing — so you cannot accidentally lose your place by tapping ahead.

There are no keyboard shortcuts. The board scales to fit your screen, so the 6×6 grid stays comfortably tappable on a phone.

• Work in a fixed order rather than tapping around. Sweeping left to right, top to bottom, builds a mental map with positions attached. Random tapping gives you pictures with no addresses.
• Say the position, not the picture. Remembering “banana, second row, third along” sticks far better than remembering that you saw a banana somewhere.
• When you flip something new, check it against your memory before flipping the second card. Most wasted moves come from turning over two cards you have never seen when you already knew where one of them was.
• Take the known pair immediately. Holding a match in reserve to “keep exploring” is how you forget it.
• On 6×6, work the corners first. Edge and corner positions are easier to encode than the middle, and it gives your map anchors.