Thank you for your interest in the NYT Games team! This exercise will help us get to know you a bit as an engineer. Your task is to create a playable version of the card-matching game Memory. Your app should fetch the game data found found here.

The game should follow the basic rules of memory:

• All cards begin face down.
• The player turns one card face up, and then a second.
  • If they match, the pair is removed from the game.
  • If they do not match, both cards turn back over.
• The game ends when the player finds all matching pairs.

The only other requirement is that you incorporate the Timer component that we’ve included in the starter project. You may modify the component to better integrate with your app as a whole, but the timer should start when the first card is flipped over and stop when the game ends. Beyond that, the sky’s the limit. All other application and interface design decisions are left to your discretion.

When reviewing your submission, the following criteria will be considered:

• Overall code clarity and organization: Does the app structure make sense? Are components broken down in a sensible way? Can we follow the control flow without a user manual?
• State management: Is the application state handled in an elegant way? Do the different pieces of state interact logically?
• Attention to detail: Did you follow all the implementation and submission instructions? Is your code reasonably bug-free?
• User experience: Is the interface intuitive and responsive? How polished does it feel?

Provided your app satisfies everything in the previous section, anything else is optional. But if you find yourself with some time left over, here are some suggestions on ways you might extend your app and really make it stand out:

• Support for three-card matches
• Progress saving for resuming an unfinished game
• User-customizable card styles
• Some sort of auditory experience
• A scoring system beyond time spent solving
• A leaderboard to record top solves
• Additional modes of play (head-to-head, race-the-clock, etc.)
• Accessibility features (keyboard navigation, voice-over effects, etc.)
• Any other variations or enhancements you might dream up that would showcase your creativity

To help you get started†, we’ve created this starter project based on NYT kyt that uses Webpack, Node, Babel, Express, React and Sass + CSS Modules, all of which are technologies we use internally. Feel free to extend the package.json with any other packages that you might want to extend the app’s functionality (for data fetching, state handling, etc.).

Clone this repository and run npm install, then npm run dev in the root directory to start up the development server. Once it’s running, you can view the app at localhost:3000††.

If you’re looking for somewhere to start, a good place to dive in is Game.js, where we’ve left a placeholder <div> for you to build on. Good luck! We look forward to playing your game.

†You are encouraged to use our scaffolding to minimize the time spent on configuration and let you jump right into coding your app. You may elect to use your own setup if you prefer, but if you do, be sure to include from-scratch installation instructions. Please track your changes through git either way; we are interested in your journey as well as your destination. When you’re finished, please zip up the project folder, upload it to a cloud store of your choice (Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.) and send a link to the address provided in your invitation; our spam filters don’t much care for attachments containing .js files. Replace the contents of this Readme with any special installation or gameplay instructions or general comments about the app not specifically called out in your code.

††See the scripts in package.json for more commands you can run (e.g., for linting and running the test suite).