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Classic Games

Memory

Instructions


The Rules

Memory is a card game designed for two people, although single player modes are available. Cards are laid out in a grid face down, and players take turns flipping pairs of cards over. On each turn, the player will first turn one card over, then a second. If the two cards match, the player scores one point, the two cards are removed from the game, and the player gets another turn. If they do not match, the cards are turned back over.

The object is to match more pairs of cards than the opposing player. (One point is scored for each matched pair, and the player with the highest score after all cards have been matched wins.) When cards are turned over, it is important to remember where they are for when the matching card is turned up later in the game.

In this online version of memory, there are twelve unique pairs of cards, making 24 cards total.

Modes of Play

This version of Memory has five distinct modes of play. In "Human vs. Human," you may play a game with another person sitting at the same computer. In "Human vs. Computer," you can play against a computer simulated opponent. In "Computer vs. Computer," you can watch two computer simulated players play against each other. The difficulty setting determines how competent the computer simulated players are at the game. On "Difficult," the computer simulated players will never "forget" where a previously seen card is located.

The "Solitaire (Strict Scoring)" and "Solitaire (Lenient Scoring)" modes are both single player modes. There is only one player, and the object is to obtain matched pairs for as many turns as possible. The computer will keep track of how many turns you take that do not result in a matched pair. The object is to minimize this count. In the "Strict Scoring" option, for every turn you take where you turn up a mismatch, a miss is counted. In "Lenient Scoring," the luck of the draw is eliminated by only scoring a miss if you should have known the second card would not match the first had your memory of previous play been perfect.

Saving Your Game

You can save your game by bookmarking the page in the game you want to come back to later. This may not always work; if you bookmark a page immediately after the computer makes a move, it might not make the same move when you return to the bookmark. To be safe, only save your game after a human player has made a move.

Cheating

Cheating at this game is possible but discouraged as a general rule. However, on occasion it can be fun to play around with the game engine. The simplest way to cheat is to hit the "back" button on your browser when something happens that you don't like. You can also cheat by modifying the URL at a particular point in the game. Notice that the URL is comprised of name=value pairs, separated by ampersands. The letter(s) or number(s) before the equals sign is the name, and what comes after it is the value. If you modify some of the values you can change the state of the game. You can experiment if you like. Below are some specific things you can do.

Change the value of k to @@@@@ to cause the computer simulated player(s) to forget where any of the previously seen cards are. Change the value of s1 and s2 to change the scores for player 1 and player 2, respectively. In solitaire mode, changing the value of s1 will change the miss count.


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