Memory Game

How a round works

1. Select two face-down cards. A matching pair stays visible; a mismatch turns face down again.
2. Continue until every pair is visible. Each board is shuffled when a new round begins.
3. A wrong pair adds one error. The round ends early if you reach its error limit.
4. Finish the board to unlock the prompt for the next size, or restart the current board at any time.

Five board sizes

The sequence starts with a 4×4 board and expands through 4×6, 4×8, 6×6, and 6×8 layouts. Larger boards contain more pairs and allow more errors, but they also ask you to remember more positions at once. The same rules apply at every size, so progress comes from building a repeatable scanning method.

The limit is calculated as 2.5 times the number of pairs, rounded up. It is a failure boundary, not a move target: a competitive clear should finish well below it.

How the ranking score is calculated

Memory Game rewards the lowest adjusted result. Your result equals the elapsed time in seconds plus a ten-second penalty for every mismatch. A 70-second clear with three errors produces a ranking value of 100. This makes a careful clear competitive even when it is not the fastest raw time.

If you enter a player name, only your best result for each level is kept on the public board. You can also choose guest play and keep the session off the leaderboard.

Practical memory techniques

• Reveal cards in a consistent path instead of jumping randomly around the grid.
• Describe a position to yourself by row and column, such as “guitar, top right.”
• When the first card is unfamiliar, choose a new second card to gather information.
• Once you know a pair, clear it immediately so the remaining board becomes simpler.

Decision rule: if the first card is known, use the second reveal to complete its pair. If it is new, reveal an unvisited position so even a mismatch adds information.

A worked six-turn example

Imagine the first reveal is a rocket in row 1, column 2, followed by a drum in row 3, column 1. Neither matches, but both positions are now useful. On the next turn, a second rocket appears at row 4, column 4. The better second choice is the remembered rocket at 1–2, not another unknown card. The pair disappears from the problem and only the drum location must still be retained.

This pattern—sample, label, then complete—reduces interference. Randomly revealing two unknown cards on every turn produces more information than working memory can reliably keep on the larger boards.

What the game stores

The shuffled board and timer live only in the current page session, so a reload starts a new layout. When a nickname is set, a completed result sends the level, raw time, mismatch count and adjusted result to the leaderboard. The nickname is optional and guest sessions do not submit scores.

Rankings are separated by level because a 4×4 result is not comparable with a 6×8 clear. The public list displays the contributing time and errors rather than showing an unexplained total alone.