Tag: card count

Creator control

Since nearly the beginning of Match The Memory, the person who plays the game has had a lot of control when it comes to the number of cards with which to play the game. The card count feature allows a player to select any number of cards, as I explained in a previous blog entry:

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.

This can be somewhat problematic, for a couple of reasons. First, the player has to know to switch the dropdown. Some games (like the periodic table matching games that we created) contain a huge number of cards, which isn’t a great experience for the people trying to match those cards. Sure, a teacher could link to the version of the game that contains an appropriate number of cards, but not a lot of people know that trick.

Continue reading Creator control

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!