Rainbow, halo, aurora, mirage. Four things you see in the sky, four reasons they happen, and a few seconds to work out which goes with which. You probably know two of them cold. The other two are where it gets interesting.
Pair Up is a matching game. Every board gives you one relationship, like a country and its currency or an organ and the hormone it makes, four cards on the left and their four partners shuffled on the right. It's one of two new free modes in Trend Trivia® 1.8.0, along with This or That, which brings the free bonus modes to eight. Nothing to unlock, no subscription involved.
How a round works
A round is six boards. Each board has a prompt across the top that tells you the relationship, like "Match the sky sight to its cause," a topic chip under it, and two columns of four cards with a label over each column so you know which side is which.
Tap a card on the left, then tap the card on the right that goes with it. A wire joins the two. Change your mind? Tap a joined card and the wire comes off, or tap a different left card and your selection moves to it. There's no timer and no penalty for rearranging, so move things around until the board looks right to you.
Once all four pairs are joined, Lock it in lights up. Tap it and each wire turns green or red where you left it. A moment later the right column slides so every card sits beside its true partner, and any left card you got wrong shows what you picked underneath it. A verdict card tells you how the board went, then it's on to the next one.
How scoring works
Every pair you get right is worth 100 points. Get all four and you pick up a 200-point bonus on top, so a perfect board is worth 600. Six perfect boards is 3,600, the most a round can score.
A quirk worth knowing: you can never get exactly three right. If three wires are correct, the fourth only has one place left to go. So a board with one mistake is really a board with two, and it drops from 600 to 200. That bonus is the whole game. Three careful boards beat six rushed ones.
The bar across the top fills in as you play, one segment per board. The XP you earn at the end is based on how many pairs you got right across the round, and your daily streak multiplier applies on top. A round of Pair Up also counts as playing for the day, so it keeps your streak alive.
What the results screen tells you
When the round ends you see your total, then six chips, one per board, reading how many of the four pairs you got. Perfect boards turn gold. Under those are your perfect-board count and your XP.
Then there's the This round card. It lists every prompt with what it scored and four small bars, one for each pair, so you can see at a glance which pairs cost you. It's a good place to find the one you half-knew and lock it in for next time.
How the boards are made (and why that helps you)
A few of the rules we write by will make you a better player.
- One partner, no arguing. Every card on the left has exactly one card on the right that fits it, and none of the others could. If a second pairing is even a little defensible, the board doesn't ship.
- The relationship is in the prompt. You never have to guess what the columns mean. "Match the country to its currency" tells you everything about the rules of that board.
- Facts that stay put. We don't use anything that changes with the next election, census or transfer window.
- Plenty of variety. Boards come from 13 topics, from Animals and Space to Food & Drink and Movies & TV, and the relationship changes every time: a landmark and its city, an organ and the hormone it makes, a country and its currency.
Tips from playing a lot of it
Join the ones you know first. On most boards there are two pairs you're sure about. Wire those up and you've turned a four-way guess into a two-way one.
Then use elimination. With two cards left on each side, you only have to be right about one of them. If you can rule out a single pairing, the board is done.
Read the right column before you tap anything. The partners are shuffled, so the order means nothing, but reading all four first often jogs loose a connection you wouldn't have made card by card.
Don't rush Lock it in. It only lights up when all four are joined, and there's no clock. Give the board one more look. Crossed wires are normal, but a wire that looks wrong to you usually is.
The Perfect Match badge
Get 10 boards perfect and you unlock Perfect Match, worth 500 XP. It counts across every round you play, so it'll come with time.
It's one of four badges that came with 1.8.0. The others are Quick Draw for This or That, Full House for playing a round of all eight free modes, and Centurion for playing 100 rounds of the free modes in total. That brings the app to 68 badges.
Will you see repeats?
Not for a while. The game keeps track of every board you've played. Boards you've never seen always come first. After those, the ones you didn't get perfect come back before the ones you did, and only then does anything cycle around. We're adding new boards all the time.
Where to find it
Update to version 1.8.0 on iPhone or Android, open the app, and look for the Pair Up tile in the free-mode grid under Solo Play. There are eight tiles there now. The intro screen runs through the rules. After your first round, Play Again skips straight to the first board.
Play Pair Up
Free for everyone on iOS and Android. Update to Trend Trivia 1.8.0 and find it under Solo Play.
The other free modes
- This or That: swipe each card to the side where it belongs. Eight cards, one clean board.
- Rank It: drag four cards into order, oldest to newest or tallest to shortest.
- Odd One Out: spot the tile that doesn't belong, then name what links the rest.
- Fact or Fiction: real or made up? You find out why either way.
- Spell It Out: guess the answer one letter at a time, with six bulbs to spare.
- Ballpark: slide a ruler to your best guess at a number. Close counts.
- Clue by Clue: who am I? The earlier you call it, the more it's worth.