Find the Match

How to play

1. How do you start a round of Find the Match?: You land on the setup screen. Row one picks the mode (steal race or 60-second sprint), row two picks symbol density (Easy is 4 symbols per card, Standard and Expert are 6), row three sets the handicap (how fast the rival is and how many seconds of head start you get). Everything is preselected, so tap START and the deal begins; tapping once during the deal skips straight to play.
2. How does a card get scored in Find the Match?: The small upper card is the reference, the large lower card is the answer card, and exactly one symbol appears on both. Tap that symbol on the lower card: a closed check ring draws around it, the symbol pops, your reaction time floats up from it, and the whole card flies to your pile on the left. The reference card is not tappable — tapping it just bounces and reminds you the answer is on the card below.
3. What happens when you tap the wrong symbol?: Nothing is deducted and the round does not end, and your streak survives. The symbol shakes and takes a diagonal slash, the whole answer card dims for 1500 ms, and a grey arc on the card rim visibly counts the lock down. Taps during the lock do nothing; when it clears you can keep going. The real cost is that the rival's ring kept running for that second and a half.
4. How is the steal race won?: The rival is a pure timer, not a thinking AI: every card has a target time drawn as the wine-red ring inside the card rim, and when that ring completes the card is theirs. First to 7 cards wins; the round is capped at 12 cards. A 12-card round can end 6-6, which is settled on average reaction time, and only a millisecond-for-millisecond tie is a draw. The summary reports margin, your average, your fastest tap, and whether you beat your record for that setup.
5. How does the 60-second sprint score?: A 60-second countdown. Each card you spot is +1, and every 3 in a row adds another +1. An auto-swap or a used hint resets the streak; a wrong tap and a reshuffle do not. Sitting on one card for 8 seconds nudges you toward the hint, and 15 seconds swaps the card out for you (that card scores nothing). Running the deck dry reshuffles a fresh one in front of you while the countdown keeps going. At zero the board freezes and further taps do not score.

Rules & variants

The core rule of Find the Match: there are only ever two round cards on the table — the small reference card above and the large answer card below. The deck is built so that any two cards share exactly one symbol, never zero and never two, so every card has a unique solution and 'I can't find it' is always just a matter of time. Your only action is tapping that shared symbol on the lower card. Once a card is decided, it is promoted to become the new reference card and a fresh card is drawn as the answer card, so the thing you are comparing against changes every single time.

Why any two cards share exactly one symbol: this is not hand-arranged, it is geometry. With s symbols per card, the deck is a finite projective plane of order s−1 — s²−s+1 cards, the same number of symbols, each symbol on exactly s cards, and every pair of cards meeting in exactly one symbol. Easy uses s=4 (13 cards, 13 symbols); Standard and Expert use s=6 (31 cards, 31 symbols). The construction is generated and self-checked at deal time, and an incomplete deck is rejected outright rather than dealt.

What the three densities change: Easy puts 4 symbols on a card in a diamond, with no rotation and no scaling — it is the setting to hand a child or a first-timer. Standard puts 6 symbols on a card (a ring of five plus one in the centre) with ±45° rotation and 0.85–1.15 scaling. Expert keeps the same 6 symbols but pushes rotation to ±180° and scaling to 0.70–1.30, so the same outline can appear upside down and shrunk. Those extra few hundred milliseconds your eye needs are the entire difficulty of that setting. All three share one rule set, one hit area formula and one set of animations.

What the rival actually is: a timer, not an opponent that looks at the cards. Each card gets a target time derived from the round seed and drawn as the wine-red ring inside the answer card's rim; when it completes, the card goes to the rival and your streak resets. The base is 1.5 s on Mid, 2.4 s on Slow and 1.0 s on Fast, each card jittered by 0.82–1.24 so the rival never sits permanently just ahead of you. The first card of every round is forced to at least 4 seconds, deliberately, so your first real action almost always lands. You can also grant yourself a 0, 1 or 2 second head start — the cost is that such a round's margin does not enter the records.

How to get faster: stop scanning from the reference card. Fix on one symbol on the answer card and look for it on the reference card; if it is not there, move to the next one. The reference card is the card you already studied last turn, the answer card is the only thing that changed, and that single habit usually cuts a third off your time. Compare outlines before details — Expert may rotate a shape 180° and shrink it to 0.7, but the number of points and notches never changes. And stop fearing wrong taps: 1500 ms of lock is cheaper than three seconds of hesitation.

Choosing between the two modes: the steal race gives you a concrete opponent and a finish line (first to 7 cards), lasts 30–60 seconds, and is the mode to use when two people take turns on one phone with the same round code. The 60-second sprint has no rival at all — just the clock and your own score — which makes it the better place to grind a record and the gentler place to start. Both modes use the same deck, the same slot layout and the same hit areas; only the score strip and the action strip swap content.

What the round code is for: the card order, the symbol mapping, which slot each symbol lands in, how far it is rotated and scaled, and every one of the rival's target times all come from a single integer seed. The round code is that seed plus a mode letter and a density character, like G6173920. Copy the round link and whoever opens it gets the identical deck — but scores are recorded separately, and reopening the same code starts a genuinely new round. Rival pace and head start deliberately do NOT travel in the code: those are your own settings, and baking them in would mean someone else choosing your difficulty.

Three house variants: (1) Take turns — two players run the same round code on one phone and compare margins; this is the recommended multiplayer format here. (2) Pure practice — set the rival to Slow and your head start to 2 seconds, which effectively removes the rival and leaves a clean recognition drill. (3) Speed run — Fast rival plus Expert density usually settles a round in four or five cards. There are no rule toggles on this page: every extra option makes the first minute heavier.

How it behaves in the browser: everything runs client-side, so the page opens straight into a round with no download and no sign-up. A round in progress is stored in this browser, and coming back later restores the same deck, the same card and the same score (the current card's timer restarts from zero, which is in your favour). Switching tabs or opening the settings drawer pauses the countdown and the current card's timer together, and returning gives you a short 'resume' beat. Symbols are vector outlines rather than images, so they scale and read out; every symbol is a real button, so Tab plus Enter is equivalent to a tap. Right and wrong are told apart by shape — a closed check ring versus a slash plus shake — so they survive greyscale and colour-vision differences.

FAQ