Most Popular Games – Week of 23 Dec. 2017

There’s not much Christmas spirit here, aside from the one Dutch “kerstmis” game. 🙂

All Games

Rank Title/Image Creator
1 Phases of the Moon Matching Game
Tori Keim
2 Mr. Polum’s Landform Game
Chris Polum
3 Irregular Verb Memory Match
Unknown User
4 States of Matter Breakout EDU
Shellye Wardensky
5 kerstmis
Jack Nowee

New Games

Rank Title/Image Creator
1 CREAMER’S CHRISTMAS BREAKOUT
Unknown User
2 Reindeer Games
Unknown User
3 Breakout – Winter Edition
Elizabeth Bell
4 SPICE SPICE BABY
Unknown User
5 Healing Potions
Unknown User

I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For (Oh, there it is!)

In a previous post about tagging, I addressed some of the problems inherent in how Match The Memory is currently built, specifically that games aren’t particularly discoverable. At the end of that post, I promised that finding games would be better in a new version of the site that’s coming “soon”.

(Update: The “new version” of the site was released in August 2018, with both search and tags pages being *much* faster than their original implementations.)

Since then, I’ve gone on a holiday game building bender, creating several new Christmas games that I thought would be enjoyable to a broad range of people. But this week, my wife helped me see that adding a bunch of games doesn’t help if people can’t find those games. So I decided to do something about it.

Continue reading I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For (Oh, there it is!)

Most Popular Games – Week of 16 Dec. 2017

Now we’re getting some holiday spirit up in here!

All Games

Rank Title/Image Creator
1 Phases of the Moon Matching Game
Tori Keim
2 Mr. Polum’s Landform Game
Chris Polum
3 Irregular Verb Memory Match
Unknown User
4 The Christmas Symbols Memory Game
Mormon Matching
5 States of Matter Breakout EDU
Shellye Wardensky

New Games

Rank Title/Image Creator
1 The Christmas Symbols Memory Game
Mormon Matching
2 Skills Breakout
Unknown User
3 Símbolos de Navidad
Mormon Matching
4 2 Types of Reproduction
Cynthia Baumann
5 1.1 Las acciones en la clase
Señora Gilson

Most Popular Games – Week of 9 Dec. 2017

I thought that we’d be knee-deep into snowmen and Christmas carols by this point in December, but there’s not a holly leaf or a nativity anywhere in sight in the most popular games. Ya bunch of Scrooges!

All Games

Not much different here.

Rank Title/Image Creator
1 Phases of the Moon Matching Game
Tori Keim
2 Mr. Polum’s Landform Game
Chris Polum
3 Irregular Verb Memory Match
Unknown User
4 Nonfiction Text Features
Suzanne Hurley
5 PARTS OF THE HOUSE
Felipe C.

New Games

This is a first: we have games in 5 different languages in our top 5. Spanish, English, Croatian, Chinese, and Arabic.

Rank Title/Image Creator
1 Accidentes geográficos
Unknown User
2 Louisiana History Review
Ali Thompson
3 Vuk i sedam kozlića Lidija
Lidija Pecko
4 VMV大比併(1)
H03
5 ارشادات الأمن و السلامة
Eman Alghamdi

Most Popular Games – Week of 2 Dec. 2017

I’m surprised that there aren’t any holiday games in here yet. I’m sure we’ll see more of these as the month goes on.

All Games

Rank Title/Image Creator
1 Phases of the Moon Matching Game
Tori Keim
2 Irregular Verb Memory Match
Unknown User
3 Nonfiction Text Features
Suzanne Hurley
4 Mr. Polum’s Landform Game
Chris Polum
5 PARTS OF THE HOUSE
Felipe C.

New Games

We’re covering a lot of the basics here: language, math, geology, civics. If you used all of these new games this week, you’d probably wind up with a pretty solid education. 🙂

Rank Title/Image Creator
1 Culture
Unknown User
2 Module 7 Review
Unknown User
3 Weathering
Unknown User
4 DiSalvi’s Vocab Review Game
Christopher Disalvi
5 Chapter 4 Vocabulary Matching with Pictures
Kyle Heaslip

Most Popular Games – Week of 25 Nov. 2017

All Games

Rank Title/Image Creator
1 Irregular Verb Memory Match
Unknown User
2 Thanksgiving Memory Game
Match The Memory
3 PARTS OF THE HOUSE
Felipe C.
4 Phases of the Moon Matching Game
Tori Keim
5 Mr. Polum's Landform Game
Chris Polum

New Games

Rank Title/Image Creator
1 Electricity Memory Game
StJosephsPrimarySchool
2 The Yummy Pie Memory Game
Curtis Gibby
3 4.2 Los animales
Señora Gilson
4 Kapittel 3
Arvid Georg Top
5 Zehnerpotenzen
Unknown User

Most Popular Games – Week of 18 Nov. 2017

All Games

More of the most popular games ever, plus one seasonal game made by yours truly.

Rank Title/Image Creator
1 Phases of the Moon Matching Game
Tori Keim
2 Mr. Polum’s Landform Game
Chris Polum
3 Thanksgiving Memory Game
Curtis Gibby
4 Irregular Verb Memory Match
Unknown User
5 PARTS OF THE HOUSE
Felipe C.

New Games

Makayla Van Fossen has made several games related to the creatures of Harry Potter, and they look really good! Check out her Magical Menagerie Party game and go from there to the others that she’s created. Plus, vocabulary from one of my favorite childhood books, Hatchet by Gary Paulsen, which I read several times as a kid.

Rank Title/Image Creator
1 El cuerpo
Unknown User
2 Magical Menagerie Party
Makayla Van Fossen
3 Hatchet Vocabulary Match
Unknown User
4 Cosas de la Clase 1
Melissa Samson
5 Thy Way is in the Sanctuary
Kelissa Delva

Counting Cards

Sometimes you come across a Match The Memory game that has too many cards for you to complete at once. Theoretically, you could match all 118 elements on our Periodic Table memory game, or all 50 US states in our states shapes game, or even all 58 denizens of Springfield, USA, but it would probably take you a long time.

We have a feature that lets you bite-size any game. We call it the “card count” feature, and it shows up in the top right corner of each game.

By default, when you come to play one of our memory games, you get all of that game’s cards. But at any point in the game play, you can decide to use fewer cards. Just use the “# of Cards” dropdown and select a lower number. Boom, you’re playing a much easier version of the game.

The Match The Memory system randomly chooses that number of cards, along with their correct matches. In this People of Springfield example, I picked a much more manageable 10 cards, for a total of 20 matches.

You’ll notice in the screenshot above that the URL changes to show how many cards you selected. You can link to a version of the game that has as many cards as you want by adding a query parameter to the URL. So a chemistry teacher can give her class a big challenge by linking to the full https://matchthememory.com/PeriodicTableAll web site address, or make the game a bit easier for the students by sending them to https://matchthememory.com/PeriodicTableAll?card_count=10 , where they’ll only get 10 different chemical elements.

Have fun counting cards!

Most Popular Games – Week of 11 Nov. 2017

All Games

No surprises here — these are some of the most popular games of all time. Who can crack the top 5 next week?

Rank Title/Image Creator
1 Phases of the Moon Matching Game
Tori Keim
2 Mr. Polum’s Landform Game
Chris Polum
3 Irregular Verb Memory Match
Unknown User
4 PARTS OF THE HOUSE
Felipe C.
5 spanish greetings
mrbojngles7 .

New Games

Some math, some anatomy, and some fantasy fun. Thanks for creating these games this week!

Rank Title/Image Creator
1 Save Mr. Uhl
Unknown User
2 Tissues Memory
Tom Diab
3 Mrs. Thornton’s Landform Memory
Meredith Thornton
4 Copper Sun Vocab 1-20
Unknown User
5 Harry Potter
Shannon Pope

Tag, you’re it!

Match The Memory was conceived as a way to share the details of your life. A fun photo here, a memory of a vacation there. It was supposed to be public, yes, and shareable too, but not necessarily viral or discoverable. A customized memory game featuring your family photos is interesting to your Facebook friends or Instagram followers, but not the world in general, so why would there need to be a robust way for someone to search for your games?

In practice, the site hasn’t been used in quite the way that I originally intended. Few people use Match The Memory to replace their annual family holiday letter, and many people instead create general-interest games that appeal to broad audiences. Teachers especially make games that help not only their own classes, but also any other students of their subject. That’s not a bad thing in the least, but it does expose some flaws in how I originally built the site.

In the beginning, the Play page was the only place to find new games to play. It shows a few random games and gives you a search field where you can type, and a list shows the titles and addresses of public games that match your query.

This works fairly well at filtering, as long as the game you want happens to have the word you’re looking for in its title or address. But it doesn’t allow you to see the games themselves, so you’re left with some questions: do they have pictures and text, or just words? Is the text too small for your target audience? Did the creator design the game in a way that’s pleasing to the eye? You have to click into those games one at a time to try them out.

In time, I decided that games needed to be taggable, and searchable not only by the keywords in the title, but also by anything else that the game creator decided was relevant. For example, games about Motion and Forces should also be accessible by someone searching for physics and science. So I added the feature and the tags page was born. There, you can browse some of the most popular tags on the site, and click into see games tagged with those terms.

The page where you view games for a specific tag has an advantage over the rudimentary search on the Play page: you can see the games’ preview images, as well as other tags that have been applied to each game. A matching game is a visual thing, and it’s easier to decide whether a particular game works for you based on a picture of that game, rather than just its title.

But the tags page has problems of its own. First and foremost, it only shows the most popular (and as of last week, the most recent) games that are associated with each tag. There may be 100 or 1,000 games on Match The Memory that have the keyword you’re interested in, like Spanish or French, but you can only see a few games in those very broad categories. There was no way to drill down to easily find a game about animal names in Spanish, or colors in French, unless those games also happened to be tagged with animales or couleurs respectively.

So last week, I built a feature to allow searching by multiple tags. Now you can find games that are tagged with both “Spanish” and “animals”, or “French” and “colors”. Just add as many tags as you’re interested in to the tag search field, separated by commas, and you’ll be taken to a tag page showing games that match both tags.

You can get to this page by changing the URL in your browser yourself. Entering

https://matchthememory.com/tags/spanish,animals

takes you to the same page as using the search field.

This is not as good as a real game search engine that would take multiple search terms and show you the most relevant games based on all of those terms. That’s coming in a rebuild that we’re currently working on, so you can look forward to a better search experience coming soon (depending on your definition of the word “soon”). But in the mean time, it’s now quite a bit easier to find the perfect matching game for you.