Match
The pairs game you already know, played as a race. Everybody gets the same twenty tiles in the same places on a board of their own, and the first to turn up all ten pairs takes it. The site holds every face until you turn it over yourself, so what is on your screen is what you have earned and nothing else.
The board
- Twenty tiles lie face down, four across and five down, and among them are ten pairs of symbols.
- Turn one tile over, then turn another. If the two carry the same symbol they are a pair and both stay up. If they do not, they stay showing until your next turn and then go back down.
- Everybody at the table gets the same twenty tiles in the same places, dealt from the game's seed, on a board of their own. Nobody is turning over your tiles and you are not turning over theirs.
- The symbols are drawn for each board from a set of twenty-five, so the pairs are somewhere different every time.
- A tile you have turned over is yours to remember. The others see how many pairs you have found and how many turns you have taken, never which tiles or where.
The race
- Everybody at the table presses Ready. Three seconds after the last one does, every board becomes turnable at the same moment.
- From then on there are no turns to wait for. Everybody is turning tiles at once, and the first to clear all ten pairs takes the board.
- The others are not cut off when that happens: once somebody clears the board, everybody else has twenty seconds to finish what they can.
- A board that nobody clears runs for two minutes and then ends with whatever each player has found.
- When two tiles you turned over are not a pair, that board pauses for a second before it will take another turn. Long enough to look at what you just saw, and long enough to make turning tiles at random a poor way to play.
- A board allows eighty turns. Turn eighty tiles without clearing it and your board is over with what you have found, which no one playing from memory will ever reach.
- A board cleared faster than anybody honestly can, in under twelve seconds, is disqualified and scores nothing. The rest of the table is unaffected.
How a game ends
- A game of Match is three boards, each with its own Ready, its own countdown and its own clock.
- After every board the whole layout is shown to everybody, with how many pairs each player found.
- The player with the most pairs over the three boards wins. On the same number of pairs, the one who took less time. Equal on both shares the place, and the turns you spent are shown but never break a tie.
- Pressing Ready has the move deadline you chose when the table was made, so a player who wanders off never holds up a board; a player who never presses it, or who resigns, is out of the game.
Worth knowing before you start
- Every turn is timed by the site when it arrives, not by your phone, so a slow connection costs you a little time and nothing can be gained by changing the clock on your side.
- The site never sends a face you have not turned over. There is nothing on the page to read ahead with, which is why this works against a stranger as well as against a friend.
- Two to four players at a table. The bot fills the empty seats of an open table and plays at one of three strengths, drawn per game from the seed; it forgets what it has seen at its own rate, which is what makes the weaker ones weaker.
- Against the bot you can ask for a hint, which marks the partner of the tile you have showing. It is a place, not a symbol: you still have to turn it over.
- Every tile is named by a number for a screen reader, not by its symbol, so a player who cannot see the board matches the numbers and no symbol has to be described.
- The seed is published when the game ends, so anybody can deal the same three boards again and check that no tile moved.
The board is dealt from the game's seed before anybody presses Ready, and the seed is published when the game ends, so a finished game can be dealt again and checked tile by tile. While it is being played the site holds every face it has not served you, so there is nothing to find in the page. Nothing here is played for money, no tile hides a prize, and the site takes nothing.
Match terms
- A pair
- Two tiles carrying the same symbol. Turn them over one after the other and they stay up for the rest of the board.
- A turn
- One tile turned over. Two turns make an attempt at a pair, and a board allows eighty of them.
- The pause
- The second after two tiles that are not a pair, during which that board takes no further turn.
- The reveal
- The showing of the whole layout to everybody once a board has ended for every player.
- The grace
- The twenty seconds everybody else has to finish after the first player clears the board.