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Matching Pairs is the card game everyone knows — also called Concentration or Pelmanism. Cards lie face down, you turn two at a time, and matching pairs are removed. What makes it a real memory test is that every card you turn and fail to match is information you have to keep.
All the cards start face down.
Turn two cards over.
If they match, they stay removed; if not, they flip back.
Remember what you saw and where.
Clear the board in as few turns as you can.
Boards are 4 × 4 (8 pairs), 5 × 4 (10 pairs) or 6 × 6 (18 pairs). A move is one pair of cards turned; the timer runs from your first card to your last match.
Your personal best is your fastest time on each board size. For the leaderboard, a finished game scores 10,000 minus 10 points per second and 5 points per move, so a clean, quick game beats a fast but messy one.
Paired-associate memory: binding an identity to a location. It is one of the oldest memory formats there is and it scales cleanly — a bigger board is a straightforwardly harder version of the same task. Another memory game to try next: Room Memory.
Matching Pairs, or Concentration, is an object-location memory task: you have to remember both what a card is and where it was. Research on object-location memory treats these as separate processes — remembering the object, remembering the positions, and binding the two together — and the binding step is the one that fails first.
It also rewards strategy as much as memory. Turning an unknown card first and a known one second means every turn adds information, which is why systematic players beat faster ones.
Turn a new card first, then a card you have already seen. That way every turn adds information.
Name each card aloud with its position — 'cat, top right'. Verbal tags survive far longer than images.
Work systematically across the board rather than picking at random, so you build a complete map.
When you find a card you have seen before, take its pair immediately. Deferring costs you the memory.
Broadly: always reveal one unknown card per turn while you are learning the board, and take any known pair as soon as it is available.
It is the traditional English name for the game. Pelmanism is another, after a memory-training system marketed in the early twentieth century.
It is one of the best memory games for children — the rules are trivial and the difficulty scales with board size.
Both, bound together. Remembering that you saw a cat somewhere is useless without the location.