Sixteen glyphs. Eight pairs. One screen. Who remembers what — and what did your partner see?
All eight pairs recovered.
Hand the screen over. Anything that flipped back stays on the board with a dot showing who saw it — that is all your partner has to work with.
Classic concentration (memory-match) has been a staple for decades, but it's a solo exercise in recall. Cooperative card games like Hanabi proved that hiding information from a teammate creates a completely different kind of tension — you're on the same team, yet you can't fully trust what they see. Glyph Vault inverts that trick: instead of seeing other players' cards, you see your own — and the only information that ever leaves your head is the card you flip and fail to match. Your partner has to read the board like a crime scene to reconstruct what you know. It's a two-player game of memory, deduction, and a tiny bit of deception.
A two-player, pass-and-play memory duel played over a 4×4 grid of sixteen Unicode glyphs (eight pairs). Two modes:
Once per turn you can spend your one hint: the game names a glyph family (e.g. "the arrows") from among the pairs you have actually seen — the only legal way to talk to your partner about what's in your head.
Deck generation: each game, 8 of ~80 glyphs from glyphs.js are drawn at random (Fisher–Yates), duplicated into pairs, and shuffled into the 16 grid slots.
Memory model: the game tracks per-player "sight" — the set of pair-ids each player has ever seen face-up. In Duel mode, a missed flip stamps the viewer's color dot onto both cards permanently. When a partner later spots two same-dotted cards, that's the deduction: "both of those were seen by Player 1, so Player 1 knows which one is which" — enough to call the pair without ever having seen it themselves.
Hint system: a hint samples the active player's sight-set, collects the glyph families present, and announces one at random. It can never name a family of a pair the player has not seen.
State machine: setup → turn (card 1 → card 2 → resolve) → handover overlay → next player, until all eight pairs are matched. The handover overlay is a full-screen blocker so the incoming player never glimpses the outgoing player's screen.
Stack: no server, no canvas, no audio — pure DOM, CSS 3D card flips, and keyboard access (Tab to a card, Enter/Space to flip).