Fewest turns, not fastest time
A turn is counted when the second card of a pair goes over. The clock runs as well, but the best score kept is turns, and the two reward opposite behaviour.
The perfect game on twelve pairs is twelve turns, and it is not reachable — you cannot match a card you have never seen. The real floor is closer to twenty, and getting near it means using the turns you spend revealing new cards to also confirm where the ones you have seen are.
The pictures are emoji, deliberately
No image files, so nothing to download, nothing to wait for and nothing to go missing when you are offline. Each set is chosen so that no two symbols look alike at a glance — a game where you cannot tell two cards apart is unfair rather than harder.
Which symbols you get depends on the font your device draws emoji with, so the same set looks a little different on a phone and a laptop.
Sizes, and playing with someone small
Eight pairs is short enough to finish with a young child. Eighteen is genuinely hard: the board is beyond what most people hold in mind at once, so it becomes a game of building the picture up in pieces.
Best turn counts are kept separately per size.
Best turn counts are kept per size, in this browser, and are never sent anywhere. No account, nothing to install.
Because the pictures are emoji rather than files, the entire game is inside the page: it appears instantly and keeps working with the network switched off.
Frequently asked questions
How long do the cards stay up?
A little under a second when they do not match — long enough to place them, short enough that you cannot use the delay to study the board. Matched pairs stay up permanently.
Can I use my own pictures?
Not in this game. If you want your own picture in a puzzle, the sliding puzzle on this site cuts a photo from your device into pieces without uploading it.
Is this good for memory?
It exercises short-term visual recall, which is real but narrow — the improvement tends to be at this game rather than at remembering things generally. It is a good game; treat the brain-training claims with suspicion.
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