Why do the critters walk off together?

Anyone who has played the card version with kids knows the loudest moment is a match. Two frogs turn up, and the whole table cheers as if those frogs had been looking for each other all day.

So that’s what happens in Critter Pairs. Match two critters and they climb out of their cards and walk off the board together, down into a little meadow under the cards. By the end of a level the board is empty and the meadow is full of pairs. You can see everything you remembered, and nobody gets left on their own.

A bit of real pairs game history

The game goes by plenty of names. Many families call it Concentration or Pairs. In Britain it’s also called Pelmanism, after the Pelman Institute, a memory-training school founded in London in the late 1890s that taught its course by post. The rules are the same everywhere. Spread the cards face down, turn two over, and keep them if they match. If they don’t, turn them back and let the next player try.

On August 25, 1958, NBC put a daytime game show called Concentration on the air, hosted by Hugh Downs. Players picked squares on a board of 30. The squares hid prizes in matching pairs, and every match uncovered part of a picture puzzle underneath. The show ran on NBC until March 23, 1973, the longest continuous run of any game show on that network.

The picture-card version many of us grew up with came from Switzerland. In Ravensburger’s own telling, a Swiss grandfather named Heinrich Hurter made a set of square cardboard cards to please his grandchildren. The German company released the game on April 15, 1959, and sold 8,000 copies that year. By 2009 the count passed 75 million. Ravensburger’s boxes credit William H. Hurter as the author, and the name “memory” is a Ravensburger trademark, which is one reason our game has a name of its own.

The four chapters

There are 40 levels, 10 in each chapter, and every chapter has its own critters. The boards grow as you go:

• Garden, levels 1 to 10: 3 to 6 pairs. Ladybugs, bees, snails and a hedgehog.
• Pond, levels 11 to 20: 6 to 10 pairs. Frogs, ducks, turtles and otters.
• Forest, levels 21 to 30: 10 to 15 pairs. Owls, foxes, squirrels and deer.
• Night Sky, levels 31 to 40: 15 to 18 pairs, ending on a 6 by 6 board. Bats, owls and the other critters who stay up late.

How to play

• Tap a card to flip it, then tap a second card.
• If the two critters match, they climb out and walk down to the meadow. Their cards stay empty.
• If they don’t match, both cards flip back after a moment. Try to remember who was where.
• Every two cards you turn counts as one move. Fewer moves earn more stars, and the target shows above the board.
• Finish a level to unlock the next one. Your stars save on this device.
• On a keyboard, the arrow keys move between cards and Enter or Space flips.
• Sound is on to start. Tap 🔊 to mute, or 🎵 for music.

Tips

Flip a new card first. If you don’t know where a match is, start your turn with a card you haven’t seen yet. Every new card tells you something.

Say it out loud. “Owl, top corner.” Naming the critter and its spot helps it stick. It works for grown-ups too.

Work along the rows. On the big boards, turn new cards in order across one row, then the next. A spot is easier to remember when you know which row you were on.

Keep going when it’s slow. Each pair that walks off leaves the board smaller. The last few pairs usually come quickly, even on a 6 by 6 board.

Your turn

Three pairs from the Garden are waiting face down at the top of this page. Flip two cards and see who climbs out first.