Ancient Cards

Ancient Cards is the third puzzle mini-game unlocked when starting a new game of *Seekers Notes: Hidden Mystery*.

Ancient Cards is a pairs mini-game. Players must uncover all the matching pairs of cards within a certain time frame. At higher Ranks there are increasingly higher numbers of cards on the game board.

Ancient Cards is unlocked when the player reaches Game Level 6.

## How To Play

* Ancient Cards face down
* Ancient Cards revealed
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The Ancient Cards game board contains a grid of over-turned cards. Tapping a card reveals an image underneath. The object of the game is to find all the matching pairs of images.

Once a card is over turned, it remains over turned until a second card is selected. If the second card reveals the same image resulting in a pair, both cards are removed from the board. If the second card reveals a different image then both cards are turned face down again.

The game is won when all cards are removed from the board.

### Time Allotted to Play

As you increase the Rank of the Ancient Cards puzzle, the difficulty of the puzzle increases. This is achieved in two ways:

1. The number of cards on the game board increases, so that there are more matches that must be found
2. The amount of time available to find the matches decreases.

These steps in difficulty only occur for the first few increases in Location Rank, once the Puzzle reaches a maximum difficulty at Detective Rank, after which no more cards can fit on the playing board and the time allotted for the puzzle remains constant, even when higher Ranks are obtained in the puzzle.

Below is a list of the Location Ranks in the game, and the amount of time allotted to them:

 Amateur
 Connoisseur
 Sleuth
 Detective
 Virtuoso
 Expert

## Tools in Ancient Cards

There are two tools available to use in Ancient Cards:

 Precise Arrow

## Collections

Listed below are the Collections specific to the Ancient Cards puzzle. *note a random special fixer is also awarded when a collection is combined for the first time.*

 Tarot Deck | Tarot Deck
 Secret Teachings | Book of Prophecies
 Legacy of the Olympians | Prometheus's Fire

## Hints and Tips

There is no great strategy to Ancient Cards. Here are some strategies that players have found useful:

* Try to save your Flying Times for use on other Puzzles and Locations.

* Saying the image of a card out loud as it is flipped and using a shortcut/ nickname for the names is helpful in memorizing the cards.

* The best approach is to work your way along the board, looking for pairs systematically. Many people find working top-to-bottom row by row or left-to-right column by column good ways of working across the board. Depending on your own memory, it might help to just try to remember 3-5 cards at a time (a portion of the first row or first column). Working back and forth i.e. top to bottom then bottom to top or left to right then right to left, may also help. At the higher game levels this game can get quite repetitive and boring as the number of potential images does not increase, just the number of cards on the board. This means there are often multiple pairs of each image. This can be useful to remember if stuck on one side of the board.
* Some established patterns for the cards are discussed in this thread.

### History

* **Use an Eyeglass to reveal all the cards for 3 seconds.** Do this at the very start. Although this is not enough time to memorize all of the card locations, it is enough time to take a take a photo of the revealed cards with another device or even take screen grab of the revealed cards (pressing the Home button and Power button simultaneously on your iPad/iPhone or other device). This will give you an image of all the cards' positions to use to make the pairs. **Warning:** this will make a simple game even less challenging and will not save you time in terms of finishing the puzzle compared to using the row by row or column by column strategy above.

## Gallery

Background art for Ancient CardsAncient Cards revealedAncient cards revealed
## Related

* SN Home
* Darkwood Town Map
* List of Puzzles
* Treasure Box
* Mosaic
* Tools
* Location Ranks
* Achievements
* Energy
* Quests
* Collections
* FAQ