Do memory games improve your memory?
Practice can make you more familiar with the task a game asks you to do. That is different from a promise of faster performance for every player. The harder question is whether that practice helps with remembering names, shopping lists or where you left your keys.
Researchers have looked at this closely, because brain-training apps once made big promises. The 2016 review Do “Brain-Training” Programs Work? by Simons and colleagues, published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, examined the studies behind those claims. It reported stronger evidence for improvement on trained tasks than for broad transfer to everyday thinking. That review is background research, not a clinical evaluation of our games.
Our games offer a focused challenge with a clear score and a place to try the techniques below. Use naming, grouping and a consistent order as ways to organise the task; a game score is not a measure of your general memory or health.
Two kinds of memory, two games
Memory games tend to test one of two things.
Where things are. Memory Match is the card game many people first played on a kitchen table, also called Pairs or Concentration. Twenty-four cards lie face down — twelve pairs of pictures from a prehistoric world. Turn two; a match stays up, anything else turns back over, and you have to remember where each picture was. This is spatial memory: a picture tied to a place.
In what order things happened. Dino Chorus is a sequence game. Four dinosaurs each sing their own note; they sing a short song, and you tap it back in the same order. Every time you get it right the song comes again with one more note on the end. This is the memory you use to repeat a phone number or a set of directions: holding a sequence in mind for a few seconds.
Techniques that make you faster
Name what you see
A glance is easy to forget; a word is not. In Memory Match, say the picture and its place to yourself — "volcano, top left". In Dino Chorus, give each singer a name and say the song as it plays: "Rex, Mo, Mo, Frost". Turning what you see into words gives your memory a second hook.
Group it into chunks
Most people can hold only a handful of separate items in mind at once. The way round that limit is chunking: grouping items so that several count as one. Long Dino Chorus songs become manageable as chunks of three or four notes, the way you would remember a phone number as groups rather than ten digits.
Work in a fixed order
In Memory Match, try turning new cards row by row rather than at random. A consistent search order can make it easier to notice which positions you have already checked and avoid accidental repeat searches. When you already know a matching pair, use that information rather than continuing the scan mechanically.
Use what never changes
In Dino Chorus the song never changes, it only grows. You do not have to relearn it each round — only the one new note at the end. Rehearse the song as it plays, and listen hardest to the last note.
Do not rush
Neither game rewards guessing. In Memory Match the board ranks time, but a wasted turn costs more than a careful one. In Dino Chorus there is no prize for tapping fast: you have up to six seconds between taps, so use them.
How each game is scored
- Memory Match: your time from the deal to the last pair, measured by our server to a hundredth of a second. The number of turns is shown too, so you can see how cleanly you played. Every round is shuffled fresh on the server, and a card's picture is only revealed when you turn it.
- Dino Chorus: the longest song you sang back without a slip. A wrong note, or more than six seconds without a tap, ends the round. Every song is written fresh by our server, one note at a time.
Both have a monthly leaderboard that starts again on the 1st of every month at 00:00 UTC. You can play as a guest straight away; sign in to put your result on the board.
A short routine
If you want to use memory games as a regular habit, try a short, deliberate session: one round of Memory Match using a fixed search order, then one round of Dino Chorus naming the notes. Compare your own times and sequence lengths across sessions, while allowing for different deals and distractions. Those results describe your play in the games; they do not establish a wider memory benefit.
