I'm making a flash memory game for sites such as kongregate, newgrounds etc. Which might be silly in itself, cause the game doesn't really fit that style. The style IMO being focused a lot on highscores and achievements. But I want to change the game, to make it fit better. Take your standard memory game. You flip cards to see if they match, and remember the ones that mismatched to get them later on. Can you come up with any idea to make it more interesting? More competitive, less random? To make it less random in determining the current "best player", I thought you could show all cards for a second initially, but it's not a pretty solution. Worst case; a player can take a screenshot at the start and use as cheatsheet. In any case, I'm asking if someone would happen to have a cool idea to add!

How about ranking best player based on some combination of speed of making matches, number of times any one card is flipped and overall time in completing a given board? You could combine this idea with either deterministic distribution (after all, who says you're dealing from a deck of cards?) where the same pattern occurs and levels so that patterns are not random at all, but rather become more complex at higher levels. So not only are you testing the memory of a new player, you're testing their old memory of the previous levels. Obviously they could still cheat, but if there are enough levels this becomes a headache.

Alternatively, you could try to come up with something that's a hybrid of a logic puzzle and a memory game where the hints to the cards are given by some system on the backs of the cards. But that would really be trying to come up with a totally different game from scratch.

I'm thinking I'll try to lean it towards speed as main focus.
Right now the working title is Speed Memory :)

How about this:
You have 3 x 6 cards, 18 in total, 9 pairs.

At the bottom you have a power-move bonus meter. When you click a card, 15% is added to it. So if you click two cards in a row very quickly, you'll get +30% in total. However, if your cards mismatch, 10% is deducted.
What's important though is that in between your clicks, there's initially a short timer, say 0.5 seconds. This timer is to allow some easing between clicks and this: When that timer has passed, your bonus meter starts ticking down as well.
That will serve as a strong incentive to constantly keep going.
Should your bonus meter reach 100%, you have a super move available which works like this:
Hover your mouse over an unflipped card. Press space, and that card plus it's matching card is removed from play. If you manage to remove two cards that you have yet lifted any of, there's a slight overall bonus for that as well.

Your score is based on overall time taken, and these small bonuses.

Also, to somewhat reduce the idea of restarting until you get a perfect start (like two first cards being a match), how about having a complete "game" being three "rounds", so you get an overall score based on these three rounds.

Not a crazy big idea, but perhaps adds some interesting depth. What do you think?

Edit: Another idea I came up with incorporates sound.

Let's say you have some sort of bonus move that can play the sound associated with the motive on the card your using the move on.
Like, two cards have the face image of a bird, thus it sounds like a bird when questioned.

Not sure how to implement that in a sweet way though...

[Edited by - tackle on February 19, 2009 2:19:11 AM]

You could make it so the game never stops. Basically when you have 4 to 10 empty spaces you add more cards to the pile.

Then add a combo system where when you match a card it reveals another card at random for X seconds(while still letting you reveal two other cards that you choose) you score some bonus points.

after that I'd be wary to add anything else because it could get too frustrating with that much/more movement.