Flip two cubes. Find a pair. Win the letter! Alpha Pairs is a memory match game with a word game built right on top of it. Every pair you uncover drops a letter onto your rack, and every word you spell from that rack is points on the board. Match well and the letters pile up. Spell well and the score does.
No two boards are alike. Each level is a new shape cut out of the six-by-six machine — twenty-nine of them, from a modest bar of eight cubes to the full thirty-six — and the machine changes colour every time you clear one. The shapes get bigger. The pairs get harder to hold in your head. And the machine gives you less and less time to think.
Your rack holds six letters. Spell anything from two to six of them, hit PLAY, and if it is in the 30,000-word dictionary the points are yours. Long words pay. Rare letters pay more. And every pair you match without a miss pushes your multiplier higher — all the way to 20x — until you miss, and it snaps straight back to 1x.
Watch out for Alphy! The little monster beside the machine is always hungry, and the rack only holds six. Win a seventh letter and the oldest one is shoved off the end — straight into his mouth. Spell your letters before he gets them.
Forget the countdown clock. The meter beside the board is your game. It starts full and drains when you dither, when you throw the machine a word that is not one, and when you keep missing on a board you should know by now. Spell a word or clear a board and it climbs right back. Keep moving and you will be fine. Freeze, and it is GAME OVER.
Every pair and every word earns tokens, and tokens buy help. REVEAL flips the whole board face up for three seconds — memorize fast! BOMB wipes the board clean and deals a fresh set of letters when you are stuck. And SUGGEST, the priciest of the three, digs through the dictionary and hands you the longest word your rack can spell. Spend wisely: the tokens you burn on a hint are tokens you will want later.
Clear five boards and the WORD RUSH hits. Sixty seconds on the clock. Letters pouring onto your rack as fast as you can spend them. And the board itself turns into a scoreboard, writing up every word you spell. When the minute is up, the machine tallies your words and your score, pays out in tokens, and sends you straight back into the game — faster and tighter than before.
Alpha Pairs features hand-drawn pixel art, an original soundtrack, and a high score table that remembers the top eight runs by name — and the level each one reached.