Christmas pictures, with three board sizes
The Christmas Memory deck uses the twelve finished pictures from our Christmas Drawing Trail: star, tree, present, snowman, stocking, gingerbread friend, bell, bauble, candle, mitten, snow globe and cottage. Easy deals six pairs, Medium eight and Hard all twelve. Each round shuffles the positions; the two smaller boards also draw a selection from the pool.
Complete a Christmas board to earn its own difficulty sticker. Best scores are kept separately for each deck and level. There is no countdown or required speed. Switching to a new round clears pending flips from the old one.
How to play Memory Match
Memory Match is the classic concentration card game, dealt fresh in your browser. Every card starts face down showing a purple question mark. Turn one over, turn a second over, and the game compares them. A pair stays face up with a green flash around the border. A mismatch pauses for just under a second so you get a proper look at both pictures, then flips them both back. The board is won when every card is face up.
The deck is shuffled twice on every new game - once to choose which pictures appear, once to scatter them across the grid - so the same level never plays out the same way. While you work, four counters along the top show pairs found, moves used, elapsed time and the level you picked, and a New game button returns you to the menu at any point.
Controls
- Touchscreen: tap a card to turn it over. Cards are large targets on phones and tablets, and they scale up on bigger screens rather than sitting small in the middle.
- Mouse or trackpad: click a card. Hovering lifts it slightly, so it is obvious which one is about to turn.
- Keyboard: every card is a real button, so Tab moves between them and Enter or Space turns one over. Face-down cards announce as a hidden card and face-up cards announce what they show, which makes the board usable with a screen reader.
Nothing is timed and nothing is penalised, so a wrong guess simply flips back. There is no lives counter and no way to lose a board.
Card decks and difficulty
Four decks share the same rules. Classic uses twenty-four bright animal emoji, from a dog and a cat through to an octopus, a crab and a couple of dinosaurs. Dinosaurs swaps them for fifteen head portraits cropped from museum-style life restorations, so matching a pair also means looking hard at a crest, a frill or a row of teeth. It doubles as name practice for children who already know their dinosaurs and want to argue about them.
Spookyis the Halloween deck: fourteen pictures made up of a pumpkin, a ghost, a bat, a cat, a spider, a spider web, the moon, a star, an owl, a candle, a candy, a lollipop, a wizard and an autumn leaf. It is deliberately friendly rather than frightening - there is nothing gruesome on the cards and nothing that moves suddenly - so it gives a seasonal session something to use without unsettling a child who finds Halloween a lot. Each spooky card is also named for screen readers, so a face-up bat announces as "Bat" rather than whatever the device calls that emoji.
Three board sizes sit under the deck picker:
- Easy, 6 pairs: twelve cards on a four by three grid. The suggested level for KS1 (Years R to 2, ages 5 to 7).
- Medium, 8 pairs: sixteen cards on a four by four grid. The suggested level for Lower KS2 (Years 3 and 4, ages 7 to 9).
- Hard, 12 pairs: twenty-four cards on a six by four grid, or four columns and six rows on a narrow phone. The suggested level for Upper KS2 (Years 5 and 6, ages 9 to 11).
Your best result is stored separately for each deck and level combination - twelve records in all - and shown on the menu button as a move count and a time. A run only replaces the record if it used fewer moves, or the same moves in less time, so the score to beat rewards accuracy first and speed second.
Stickers
Memory Match is a completion game in the site-wide sticker book: one sticker per level cleared, per deck. The classic deck earns Memory Sprout, Memory Tree and Memory Forest. The dinosaur deck earns Dino Hatchling, Dino Explorer and Dino King. The spooky deck earns Pumpkin Pal, Ghost Friend and Moonlight Matcher. Nine are available in total and each one lands the moment the final pair is matched.
Tips for finding pairs faster
- Work one corner at a time. Turning over cards that sit next to each other is far easier to hold in your head than jumping about the board.
- Say the picture out loud. Naming a card as it turns over gives you a second way to recall it, which helps most on the dinosaur deck.
- When a mismatch flips back, place both cards before you touch anything else. Most lost pairs are forgotten in that gap.
- Chase the move counter rather than the clock. Because a tie is broken on time, careful play beats fast play for a new personal best.
Who Memory Match is for
Matching pairs is a gentle workout for visual working memory, sustained attention and turn-taking, and it needs no reading and no typing, which makes it easy to hand to a child who is not ready for a text-heavy activity. The three board sizes mean the same game stretches from a first attempt at six pairs to a real challenge at twelve, so a tutor can raise the demand without changing the activity.
It suits anxious or easily overwhelmed learners in particular. Nothing counts down, nothing is marked wrong, and a mismatch costs only the second it takes to flip back. Played out loud it also becomes a two-player turn-taking game on a single screen, which is useful in a 1:1 session in the room or over a screen share.
Is Memory Match free to play?
Yes. It is free to play in your browser, with no signup, no download and no in-game purchases. Built by a UK SEND tutor with QTS.
Questions parents and tutors ask
Is there a time limit?
No. The clock counts up so you can see how long a board took, but it never runs out and nothing is lost if a child sits and thinks.
Are the best scores saved?
They are saved in the browser on that device, one record per deck and level, so a child can chase their own record between sessions without an account. Clearing the browser storage resets them.
Which dinosaurs are on the cards?
Fifteen: T-Rex, Brachiosaurus, Triceratops, Stegosaurus, Velociraptor, Pteranodon, Ankylosaurus, Parasaurolophus, Dilophosaurus, Gallimimus, Allosaurus, Spinosaurus, Iguanodon, Microraptor and Carnotaurus. Each board draws its pairs at random from that set, so a six-pair game shows a different cast every time.
Is there a Halloween memory game?
Yes. Pick the Spooky deck on the menu and the cards become a pumpkin, a ghost, a bat, a cat, a spider, a spider web, the moon, a star, an owl, a candle, a candy, a lollipop, a wizard and an autumn leaf - fourteen pictures, drawn from at random for each board. It plays exactly like the other two decks and has its own three stickers.
Does it work on an interactive whiteboard?
Yes. The card grid scales to the space it is given rather than sitting at a fixed size, so the cards get bigger on a whiteboard instead of stranding the board in the middle of the screen.