I love games, and I'd always wanted a simple card game that would help me learn new things while keeping my memory sharp.
Memi is that game. You get a picture; you try to name it before revealing the answer. Countries, movies, animals, paintings, famous people — there's always something new to learn or remember.
How to play
- To learn: pick a category you don't know well, reveal the answer, and follow the know more link to read about it. Each exposure strengthens the link between the image and the name.
- To test yourself: once a category feels familiar, cycle through it and see how many you can name without revealing.
Why it works
This is a simple form of active recall — pulling information out of memory instead of re-reading it. The testing effect, well documented in cognitive psychology, shows that retrieval practice builds more durable memory traces than re-exposure alone.
Because each prompt is a picture, the game also leverages the picture superiority effect: images are encoded more richly than words and are easier to retrieve later. Naming the item is a form of cued recall, sitting between simple recognition (“have I seen this before?”) and unaided free recall.
Short, frequent sessions outperform long ones — the spacing effect. A few minutes a day is enough.
Why there are several editions
The general edition roams everywhere, which is the point of it. But a place is easier to learn when it's the only thing in front of you, and the words that go with it belong in its own language — so Portugal, Lisbon, Slovakia, the United States, the Pyrenees and Kraków each get their own edition, with their own categories.
They all run on the same engine, so whichever one you open, the game plays the same way.