Draft — not published. This guide and the game it describes are both behind the owner gate while the game is in review. The name is settled enough to build on but not to launch on: Pairs is deliberately generic, and the more famous name for this game is somebody else’s trademark in a number of regions. It is not used here, it is not used in the game, and it should not start being used in either.
A table of cards face down. Turn two of them over. If they carry the same symbol they stay up and they are yours; if they do not, they go back the way they were — but now you know what was there, and where. That is the whole game, and it is entirely a game about paying attention.
The goal
Every symbol on the board is on exactly two cards, so the board always works out evenly and there is never an odd card left over. Find every pair and the board is cleared.
Playing on your own, the job is to clear it in as few turns as possible — the game keeps your best run for each board size on your device. Playing against somebody else, the job is to end up holding more pairs than they do.
Controls
- Tap or clickTurns a card over. Tap a second and the turn resolves — they stay up if they match and go back if they do not.
- Arrow keysMove between cards on a keyboard, stepping over any that are already matched. Enter or Space turns the one you are on.
- NDeal a new board. R does the same, as does the refresh button in the top bar.
- Tap the boardOnce a board is cleared, a tap anywhere on it deals the next one. So does Enter, and so does the Play again button.
- GearOpens the settings sheet — solo or two players, how big a board, and who goes first.
A pair that does not match turns itself back over after about a second. You do not have to wait for it: on your own, turning your next card puts them back immediately and gets on with it.
The two modes
Solo
The default. A move counter, a clock, and a count of the pairs still out there. The clock does not start until you turn your first card, and it stops the moment the last pair lands — reading the settings sheet is not timed and neither is thinking.
Each board size keeps its own best run, and the best is judged on moves first, with the clock only breaking a tie between two equally good ones. That is on purpose: moves is the part that is memory. Time is mostly how fast you tap.
Pass & play
Two people, one device. Turns alternate — except that a matched pair earns another turn, which is the entire tactical game. A player who remembers where two cards are does not score one pair, they score a pair and then get to use what else they know, and a good memory turns into a run of four or five in a row.
Whose turn it is is said twice: in the status line, with that player’s token beside it, and by which of the two score boxes is lit. Most pairs when the board runs out wins; an even split is a draw, which the smaller boards can produce and the largest one cannot.
One deliberate difference between the modes: on your own, tapping a new card while a mismatched pair is still showing turns them back and counts as the start of your next turn. In pass and play the same tap only turns them back — it does not become the next player’s first card, because the finger that made it belonged to the player whose turn had just ended.
The three board sizes
The rules do not change; the number of things you are holding in your head does.
Easy — six pairs, twelve cards
Small enough that a careful player can clear it close to perfectly. Twelve cards is roughly where most people stop needing to guess, which makes this the size to learn the symbols on and the one to hand to somebody who has not played before.
Medium — eight pairs, sixteen cards
The default, and the size the game is really built around. Sixteen cards is past what most people hold comfortably, so the last few pairs come down to what you noticed early and did not think you were noticing.
Hard — fifteen pairs, thirty cards
Fifteen of the sixteen symbols, so nearly the whole set is in play and there is one absent each game. Thirty cards is a real memory load and a long game — and in pass and play it is the size where a run of consecutive matches decides the whole thing.
Tips
Turn a new card first, then a known one
The most useful turn is the one that teaches you something. When you already know where a symbol is, open an unknown card first: if it happens to be that symbol you take the pair anyway, and if it is not, you have learned a new card for free instead of spending the turn confirming something you knew.
Remember positions, not pictures
Most people try to remember “the tent” and lose it. Remember “the tent is second from the left on the bottom row” and it stays. The grid is the thing your memory is good at; give it the position and let the symbol hang off that.
Work an area, not the whole board
On the big board, turning cards at random across all thirty gives you thirty half-memories and no pairs. Concentrate your unknown-card turns in one region until you have that region mapped, then move along. You will find pairs sooner and remember more of what you saw.
In two players, count what you are giving away
Every card you turn over is shown to the other player too. Late in a game, when you have no pair you are sure of, the least damaging turn is often one that opens a card next to one they have already seen rather than a fresh corner of the board. You cannot pass, so the question is only ever which card costs you least.
The last few pairs are free — get there with turns to spare
When only three or four pairs are left, most of them are already known and they come off in a run. That means the game is decided in the middle, and in pass and play it means the player who happens to be on turn when the board opens up takes the lot. Watch for it, and try not to hand them the turn that starts the run.
Good to know
- Every symbol in this game — sixteen of them, all on an expedition theme — is drawn by the page itself. There is no artwork to load, so it starts instantly and stays sharp at any size, and nothing on a card came from anybody else’s icon set.
- Which symbols appear is chosen fresh each deal, so two games on the same board size are not the same six or eight pictures in a different order.
- Your best runs and the pass-and-play tally are saved on your device. Buttons in the settings sheet clear whichever of the two the current mode uses.
- No account, and nothing is sent anywhere. Clearing your browser data clears your bests and your settings.
- The board changes shape to suit the screen: the same thirty cards are five across and six down on a phone held upright, and six across and five down when it is turned. Nothing on the page ever scrolls.