Strategy: remember the cards and miss less

Start with a card you haven't seen

Flipping a card you've already seen first teaches you nothing. Flipping an unknown card, on the other hand, reveals an image: if it has already been seen elsewhere, the second card of the attempt is obvious. Example, game MM2-PAAU-AAAAAAB: on attempt 3, the "giraffe" card (row 1, column 5) is new, and its pair had been seen earlier (row 1, column 1): pair found without a miss.

Never miss a known set

As soon as all the cards of an image have been seen (two for pairs, three for triples), take them: it's a guaranteed successful attempt, and one less set of positions to remember.

Go through the board in a fixed order

Revealing the cards row by row, from left to right, helps you remember where the images are: a position is easier to recall when you know in what order you opened the cards. Corners and edges also serve as landmarks.

What a perfect memory does

A player who forgets no card and follows these three tips still misses: at the start, they know nothing. Across 500 games of each format drawn by the app at Hard level, without reshuffling, here is the number of missed attempts for such a player:

None of these games is lost by this player: the limit leaves some margin. For a real player, the gap between the "at most" column and the limit is the room for forgetting. It shrinks quickly on a large board: with 54 cards, you have to remember dozens of positions at once, well beyond what short-term memory holds without effort.