About Memory Match

Every card starts face down. Turn two over: if they match, they stay up; if not, they turn back and you have to remember what was where. The board is cleared when every pair is found, and the fewer turns it takes, the better your memory did. Nothing is hidden from you and nothing is random once the cards are dealt, so this is one of the purest tests of short-term recall there is.

There are four decks. Animals and Food are the classic picture game. Shapes is harder than it looks, because the same shape comes in several colours and the same colour in several shapes, so a glance is not enough. Numbers turns it into arithmetic: each sum has to be matched with its answer, so 7 × 8 goes with 56 and 29 + 18 with 47. Boards run from twelve cards to thirty-six, and a triples mode asks you to find sets of three instead of pairs.

The daily challenge deals the same 24 cards to everyone, with the deck changing from day to day, and ranks the day's players by fewest moves and then fastest time. At the end you also see your memory slips: turns you got wrong even though you had already seen where the match was. A slip-free board is the thing to aim for.

Tips to win

• Turn over a card you have not seen yet first; if its partner is one you remember, the turn is free
• Work in a fixed order, row by row, so locations are easier to hold in your head
• Name what you see under your breath — "fox, top left" — since words stick better than pictures for most people
• On the Numbers deck, work out the answer the moment a sum appears, then look for the number rather than the sum