games – Match The Memory

Moving forward by looking back

At Match the Memory, we know that lots of people use our games for educational purposes. The most popular games over the last year deal with phases of the moon, landforms, and lab equipment. Thousands of games about languages, animals, verbs, science, and math have been played millions of times.

But we found that there was a pretty major gap in both the games that our users have created and the ones that we ourselves had added to the system. There weren’t a lot of games about history. In our ranking of tags by the number of games associated with that tag, history is 24th most popular, right behind Christmas. Our system users had a handful of games that fell under the history umbrella, mainly related to US Presidents, but we didn’t have a dedicated user for that topic.

We decided that this hole in our offerings needed to be filled, so we got to work, starting with American History. We identified several major time periods in the history of our country — each roughly analogous to a chapter in an 8th-grade textbook — and created new games covering the people, places, and ideas of those time periods.

These new games are bundled under a new system user called “History Buff”. They all have several cards listing major subjects in that time period, with pop-up content giving a bit more background about those topics when you match a pair of cards. This makes them perfect for an introduction to the chapter, or a quick review session before a test.

We have plans to supplement this US History content with more World History games in the next few months. (We already have games for Gods Of Ancient Egypt, Ancient Civilizations, and Latin American Revolutions.) We hope that you find these new games useful, and that you learn a lot about democracy as you do. As the old saying goes, those who fail to learn the lessons of the past are doomed to repeat them.

A productive school year!

Since the start of the 2023-2024 school year, you guys have created some fantastic new games. Here are the most popular — way to go, team!

Rank	Title / Image	Creator
1	Ms. Luna’s Solar Eclipse Game	Ms. Luna
2	Ep Library Skills	Sarah Hubbard
3	Library Breakout 2023	Erica Morgan
4	Fast and Slow, Objects Go	Kaitlyn Bratcher
5	Spring Holidays & Celebrations Around the World	Ms. Luna
6	Pattern Matching Game	Ms. Swinton
7	Fall Things	Annie Reed
8	Personality Adjectives	Anna Ocampo
9	Mythvivor: Miskatonic University – All-Stars Memory	Coffee
10	0-10 Number Spanish	Veronica Shuguli

Fun spelling helpers

My kids’ school uses the McGraw-Hill Reading Wonders curriculum for spelling lists, and I made a few matching games last year for my 4th-grader to practice his spelling words. At the start of this school year, I decided to fill in the whole elementary school spelling spectrum. Here’s 180 matching games full of spelling words (30 x 6 = 180)!

Happy 10th Birthday, Match The Memory!

The first version of Match The Memory launched exactly 10 years ago today. Since then, you’ve made thousands and thousands of memory games (25,000+!), which have been played more than 12 million times. Today, we’re celebrating not just the site itself, but the creators who made the best games on the site.

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.