Memory Match Mini-Game

A stock Mini-Game where you flip over two tiles and try to find matching pairs. Sometimes the gameplay is partially justified by having you match items that actually appear in pairs (it's almost never explained why you can only look at two at once), but most games don't bother or just have you play an in-universe board game. Some variations spice things up by adding panels that don't match with anything, panels with special effects — helpful or otherwise — or by adding a Shell Game-like mechanic where the tiles get shuffled around. If the mini-game awards in-game prizes, they'll often be tied to the matches you find.

This type of gameplay is the basis for several common tabletop games, which have inspired many a designer to add it to their video games. It also helps that it's easy for the player to learn and easy for the developer to implement. Another point in its favour is that it works as both a solitaire game (which may have a move limit or time limit) and as a competitive game, and that it has elements of both luck and skill.

Compare Card Games, Shell Game, and "Simon Says" Mini-Game for similar stock mini-games. Contrast Pop Quiz. See also Betting Mini-Game, which this mini-game is sometimes used as. See also Digital Tabletop Game Adaptation.

---

Examples

Tabletop Games

• Concentration is a game that can use a standard 52-card deck or a dedicated deck. On their turn, a player flips two cards and keeps them if they match. (If a standard card deck is used, they match if they're of the same rank and colour.)
• Memory is a stand-alone game where players flip two cards on their turn, keeping any matches.

Video Games — Action-Adventure

• LEGO Island 2: The Brickster's Revenge: "Matching Mummies" is a minigame on Adventure Island where Pepper must match hieroglyphs by knocking on sarcophagi while also dodging the mummies in the center to collect a Constructopedia page. After the page is collected, the rest of the minigame is a chase against a giant boulder coming after Pepper.
• In LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, one of the Kyber Bricks on Canto Bight is earned by playing a matching game in the casino, which involves using a blaster to flip over the tiles.

Video Games — Action Games

• Cuphead: In the King's Court where the boss fight against King Dice takes place, the puzzle miniboss Mr. Chimes starts off invulnerable, and there's a grid of cards in the background. You use your parry move to flip cards. If you flip two cards that don't match, Mr. Chimes speeds up, but if you flip matching cards then he becomes vulnerable to your attacks. He switches back to invulnerability after you damage him enough, and the fight is designed so you have to match all the cards to do enough damage to beat him.

Video Games — Adventure Games

• Wishbone and the Amazing Odyssey: The third door of Aeolus's tower on Thrinacia is one, matching a god with their symbol. It requires the tapestry from Circe's island to be hung on the door to activate.

Video Games — Card Battle Games

• 100% Orange Juice!: One of the Playground Minigames you can randomly play from a Minigame Panel is called "Match 2", which involves matching two pairs of cards. The player is presented between 8-12 face-down cards at the start and, depending on what number they roll on the die from 1-6, will reveal the exact number of cards they rolled for a head start. If the player succeeds in matching all pairs, then the last pair they matched becomes their prize. However, they only have three attempts to do so, and because the minigame is hosted by Marie Poppo, losing the minigame outright will cause her to select a random prize for the player out of their control which can be either good or bad.

Video Games — Deckbuilding Games

• Slay the Spire: The match and keep event has you playing with the in-game cards. You get 5 tries, any cards you match are added to your deck, including curses.

Video Games — First-Person Shooters

• Half-Life: Alyx has one of these for a Hacking Minigame, where you have to use the multitool to connect matching sets of colored dots without making too many mistakes.

Video Games — Idle Games

• In Castle Cats and Dungeon Dogs, one of the two minigames each game has that lets you earn gems daily is a memory matching game. The images of the characters used in the matching games rotate each season.

Video Games — Mini-Game Games

• One of the games included in Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics is this.
• The Jul i Skomakergata Licensed Game has a mini-game where you reveal shoes and try to find matching pairs.
• The original Pinchcliffe Grand Prix Licensed Game has a mini-game where you open drawers and try to find matching socks.
• WarioWare: Some installments feature a minigame that involves turning over pairs of matching cards. As a microgame, there are only four cards (due to the game's rapid-fire nature) while Gold features a stand-alone game with ten pairs on the board.

Video Games — MMORPGs

• Toontown Online: One of the trolley games is the Toon Memory Game, where you run around in a room with a bunch of big tiles on the floor. They have images of gags (your attacks) on the other side, and you have to flip over two with the same image to clear them. The more pairs you match before time runs out, the more points you get. If you play in two-player, each player can only have one tile flipped over at once.
• One daily quest in World of Warcraft is a matching game from the Tortollans where you simply turn over shells to match various game models (not to be confused with a Shell Game). There isn't any penalty for getting an incorrect match aside from losing your own free time.

Video Games — Party Games

• Mario Party series:
  • In the original game, "Memory Match" is a single-player mini-game where you ground-pound panels to reveal them and try to find all the matching pairs within 45 seconds. There's also a non-matching Bowser panel that stuns you if you hit it.
  • Mario Party DS: The minigame "Memory Mash" features teams of two race to claim four pairs of matching cards before the other, flipping them over by ground pounding.
• In Rugrats: I Gotta Go Party, the "Match Up" mini-game has eight pairs of cards that need to be matched within a 45-second time limit; Tommy, Chuckie, Lil, Angelica, Susie, Dil, Kimi, and Spike. The more pairs that are matched when the time limit ends, the more points you will get for the score tally.
• Wii Party: "Face Flip" is a variation on this type of minigame. The game features three rows of four cards, each featuring one of the players' Miis. Players can only turn over cards on one row at a time, starting with the top row and continuing to the next row if the chosen card features the player's Mii. The first player to find the card on each row that features their Mii is the winner, while the last player left after all other players have found their cards comes last.

Video Games — Platform Games

• 102 Dalmatians: Puppies to the Rescue:
  • The PC version has the mini-game "Dig Dog". Despite the name's similarity to Dig Dug, it's a memory game where you have your puppy dig up two spots at a time and try to find matching objects. The goal is to find every pair as fast as possible.
  • The Game Boy Color version has the unlockable minigame "Picture Matching", where the player has to match a series of picture pairs within a time limit.
• Banjo-Kazooie: Inside one of the pyramids in Gobi's Valley, the player has 100 seconds to Ground Pound the floor's tiles to reveal images and match the couples. If the images don't match, they'll flip back and the player will have to keep trying; if they do, they'll stay shown. There's a total of 16 tiles distributed in a 4x4 pattern (meaning there are 8 pairs). If all of them are revealed under the time limit, a Jiggy appears. In the Pop Quiz challenge near the end of the game, this minigame can reappear, with the added caveat that the time limit has been reduced to only 75 seconds.
• Donkey Kong Land 3, the Game Boy follow-up to Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble! has such a mini-game at Bear's Sheepy Shop. You can win DK Coins and Stopwatches from it, which are both needed to access the final world.
• Sonic the Hedgehog: The Tiny Chao Garden in Sonic Advance, Sonic Advance 2 and Sonic Pinball Party features the Chao Memory mini-game, where you try to match up seven pairs of cards while a Chao moves them around.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom: The original PC version has the minigame "Manhole Memory" where the objective is to click on two manhole covers to find matching pairs of either SpongeBob SquarePants characters or robots. The minigame comes in three rounds and you receive an important item for the Magic Shop by clearing each of them. Storywise, this is justified because SpongeBob gets short-term amnesia from the crazy robot drivers in the previous minigame "Traffic Jam" and needs something to jog his memory of finding Patrick.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Super Mario Bros. 3: When the player's score reaches 80,000 (and each multiple thereafter), a N-Spade card will appear over whichever level the player last finished. An array of 18 cards will appear, with one of eight configurations. You flip over two cards at a time. A matching pair awards you the item shown, but two incorrect matches will end the game. The game will not appear in the final world.
  • In Super Mario 64 DS, one of Luigi's mini-games is Memory Match, where you flip over two cards at a time. You are rewarded if you find a matching pair, and penalized otherwise. In the multiplayer version, you get an Extra Turn if you find a pair. The mini-game later reappears in New Super Mario Bros.. There's also a harder version called Memory Master, which is exclusive to 64 DS.
  • New Super Mario Bros. Wii: There's a Toad House minigame called Power-Up Panels, which offers a variation where flipped panels remain flipped, but there's still a memorization aspect in that depending on the world, the panel configuration is drawn from a common pool. You have a grid of panels where you can flip them over; match two of the same power-up and it goes in your inventory. If you match two Bowser or Bowser Jr panels, you lose the minigame.

Video Games — Puzzle Games

• A Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends flash game is titled "Door to Door". In this game, the characters from Foster's are hidden behind different doors, and the goal of each level is to find all the matching characters before time runs out. As the levels progress, new floors and characters get added, requiring the player to scroll up and down to find all the matching characters.
• Hidden City has Cards of Fate, where the players must match numerous cards within a set amount of time. Sometimes, a "Moves" anomaly might appear, and the player have to match all the cards within a certain number of moves.
• Mickey's Memory Challenge is a game released for DOS in 1990 and ported to Amiga three years later. In this game, you can choose one or two players to match cards of either Disney characters or objects (this can also be done with either two pictures or one picture and one description), whether to have eight, fifteen, or twenty-four cards to match, and how many bomb or wild cards are in this game. The seven franchises featured in this game are Mickey Mouse, Pinocchio, Peter Pan, DuckTales (1987), The Little Mermaid (1989), Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers, and TaleSpin.
• The Windows Vista game Purble Place has a mini-game called Purble Pairs. There are three difficulties: Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced. As the difficulty increases, the timer gets tighter, the variety of images increases, and the grid size increases. One tile per round has a gold token that can be collected when the player has found the match for that tile, and the player can have three at a time. The tokens can be used to peek at the tiles.

Video Games — Role-Playing Games

• Fable: One of the in-universe pub games has you match eight unique card pairs in a 4x4 grid within a time limit. Matched pairs stay visible, but unmatched cards immediately flip back face-down. You can bet on your performance to earn money.

Video Games — Simulation Games

• Imagine Party Babyz: The "Pairs" minigame revolves around memorizing a series of pictures and picking out the one that matches the one shown.
• Tomodachi Life features two variations. In the solo version, the player must find all the pairs on the board without losing all five of their lives. The VS version, on the other hand, sees the player competing against a Mii to find the most pairs, with each player getting another turn upon finding a pair.

Video Games — Sport Games

• Mario Tennis: In the GBA entry Power Tour, one of the minigames used to level up your stats is Instinct Drill, where you have to match pairs of cards in 60 seconds, with the twist that you can use ESP to see the underside of the cards.

Video Games — Third-Person Shooters

• This is one of two Hacking Minigames in Mass Effect 2, with the player having to match multiple pairs of symbols within time limit. In a twist, the minigame takes place on a stylized circuit board, whose conductive traces provide visual hints regarding which (randomly placed) pins should be connected to each other.

Video Games — Tower Defense

• Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time: Ancient Egypt has a minigame called "Mummy Memory", where groups of zombies carrying large camel pictures appear. Tapping the pictures turns them around to reveal a symbol. Match two symbols and the corresponding zombies are defeated.

Video Games — Wide Open Sandbox

• The Minecraft adventure map Diversity 3 features a mini-game like this in its Puzzle branch. There are matching pairs of mobs on each side (such as a red Mooshroom on one side and a brown one on the other, or a zombie wearing a skeleton skull and a skeleton wearing a zombie head), and you get a limited amount of guesses to match them all together.

Appearances in Other Media

Live-Action TV

• Concentration is a Game Show that has the players reveal two hidden panels and rewards players for revealing matching pairs.
• Odd Squad: The episode "Put Me In, Coach" opens up with Oprah playing this game, only with pictures of villains. She has three matches but doesn't match either card she flips over next (Fladam and Odd Todd), causing her to give a growl of frustration before and Olympia and Otis walk in.
• Survivor: Occasionally, one of the challenges will have contestants unveil covered items, with the goal of finding matching pairs. In Samoa, tribes could opt to keep whichever items they matched should they win reward, at the cost of having it count towards their score.

Webcomics

• In Homestuck, one of Jade's highly specialized fetch modi — interfaces used to retrieve items from in-universe character inventories, as part of the comic's parody of RPGs — is a match-two game. The items are each "split" into two cards and shuffled around face down. Identify both cards in the same try, and you can retrieve your item.

Websites

• Neopets featured a game called Kiko Match which involved picking cards that had matching Kiko. on later levels, the card color also becomes important where if two cards have the same Kiko but one card is red while the other is blue, then they are not counted as a match.
• The survey platform Toluna has a mini-game where you flip over two cards and try to find a match. The hardest difficulty has a strict time limit and has the tiles move around after each move.

Other Media

• German photo printing company Cewe has the "Personalised Photo Pairs Game", which lets you make a custom memory match game using 25 of your own photos.

---