Don't Flip The Doom Card

Link to the game on Newgrounds.

Games of Concentration are exactly what the name implies: brute-force memorization of a playfield of face-down cards with no optimizing heuristic. Don’t Flip The Doom Card uses this as its basis, but manages to weave in actual antagonists: “doom cards” (printed with a skull and an ominous black flame behind them) that will move across the board on each flip by exchanging itself with another card. While flipping one at any point instantly reshuffles the field and docks you a heart, you can see a skid mark between their previous and current position, and your initial flip of each turn also shows the contents of the spaces around you. With that boon in play, the actual base memorization is simple; the real challenge is finding ways to trap the doom cards by surrounding them with matched, face-up pairs.

In practice, the first bit of each level tends to favor grinding through the regular Concentration game plan while the doom cards move on their own. Once the field has evolved a bit, however, you can begin strategizing on how to trap the doom cards. An interesting outcome of this system is that stuffing two doom cards into a corner to endlessly exchange with one another is optimal, but if you accidentally give them room to add a third card to their pocket without tracking their positions adequately, you’re trapped with a 33% chance to click on the correct card in their pocket, compared to a 50% chance for an untracked doom card stuck in a pocket of two cards. Thus, choosing whether to split up or corral doom cards becomes integral, although thankfully your “peek” radius around a card when clicked wraps around the playfield, letting you check a card on the opposite side of the field from the pocket in order to track the doom card’s position.

In the Extra mode, some cards let you peek adjacent cards, while others let you peek diagonal cards.

While the game still essentially revolves around memorization (and could be trivial if notes were taken from the beginning of every round), the addition of card movement and failure adds just enough complexity that keeping track of every position is immensely difficult, and thus the player will have to reason on how to reduce said complexity by restricting the doom card movement. Case in point: the Extra mode adds blue cards into the mix, which allow the player to peek diagonally instead of at adjacent cards; in turn, blue doom cards move diagonally on each turn. Again, the mental load this adds becomes quite straining without getting early barriers set up between groups of doom cards. However, in a clever twist the multiple card colors means that you can “trick” doom cards into switching with a card of the opposite color, making it easily clear based on their movement pattern which one of the two positions they’re in. A fascinating way to turn a game of strict memorization into one of making educated guesses based on the behavior of the system.