How to play
Tap two cards to flip them. Matching pairs stay open. Clear all 8 pairs to win.
About Fruit Memory Match
Fruit Memory Match is the card-pairing game you probably played on a living room floor as a child, laid out on a screen with fruit instead of cartoon animals. Sixteen cards sit face down in a four by four grid. Under them are eight pairs of fruit. Turn over two at a time, remember what you saw, and clear the board in as few moves as you can.
How to play
Tap any card to flip it, then tap a second. If the two match, they turn green and stay face up for the rest of the game. If they do not, you get a little under a second to look at them before they flip back. Every pair of cards you turn counts as one move, whether it matched or not, and the counter at the top keeps track alongside the number of pairs found.
The eight fruits are an apple, a banana, grapes, cherries, a watermelon slice, a lemon, a kiwi and a peach. The cards are shuffled fresh every game, so yesterday's memory is no help today. When the eighth pair is found, tap anywhere to deal a new board.
There is no timer. Take as long as you like over each choice. The only thing being measured is how many moves you needed.
What a good result looks like
With eight pairs, a perfect game takes eight moves, and that only happens by luck. A player with a sharp memory and a sensible method usually finishes in somewhere between twelve and sixteen. Over twenty-five suggests you were guessing more than remembering, which is fine, because guessing still gets you there in the end.
A method that works
Do not flip cards at random. Work through the grid in order, row by row, so that every card you have seen has a place in a pattern. It is much easier to recall "second row, third card" when you looked at the cards in sequence.
When you turn over the first card of a move and you already know where its twin is, take the pair straight away. When you turn over a first card you have not seen before and have no match for, make your second flip a card that is also new. That way a miss still teaches you something. Flipping a card you already know, just to end the turn, wastes a move.
Saying the fruit out loud helps more than you would expect. "Lemon, top left" sticks better than a picture alone.
Good for the brain, easy on the nerves
Memory games like this one exercise short-term recall and attention, and they do it without any pressure. There is no way to lose, nothing chasing you and no clock. That makes Fruit Memory Match a nice choice for younger children who are learning to concentrate, and for anyone who wants a calm five minutes instead of a frantic one.
It also makes a good shared game. Two people can take turns on one phone and count who finds more pairs.
Fruit Memory Match runs in the browser on phones, tablets and computers. It is free, needs no download, and a new shuffle is ready whenever you are.