A matching game about the financial terms people mix up. Every board deals four terms against five definitions, and the fifth belongs to a near-synonym that was deliberately kept off the board — so the last pair can never be taken by elimination.
Term Match deals three boards of four financial terms against five definitions. Four of the definitions have a partner on the board and the fifth does not: it belongs to a close neighbour of one of the terms in play, which is why guessing what is left over does not work. Terms are drawn from spending, borrowing and protection, investing, the economy, and scams, and no two terms in a round come from the same confusable cluster. A round takes about two to three minutes.
Tap a term, then tap the definition that fits it — or tap them in the other order. There is no dragging anywhere in this game. Tapping another card on the same side moves your selection; tapping the card you already picked releases it. Every card is a real button, so Tab reaches them, the arrow keys move between the two areas, Enter or Space selects and judges, and Escape cancels. A freshly dealt board ignores taps for four tenths of a second so a burst of taps cannot carry across.
A match is worth 100 base points, multiplied by the term's difficulty weight and by your current streak multiplier, rounded to the nearest whole number. Easier terms weigh 1, the middle band 1.3 and the hardest 1.6. The streak multiplier rises by 0.5 on every second match in a row and stops at 2.5 times, which a twelve-pair round reaches on the seventh. A mismatch scores nothing, resets the streak and costs one of four chances. Finishing all twelve pairs inside the bonus window adds 15 points for every whole second left, up to 2,475.
The round ends in one of two ways: all twelve pairs matched, or the fourth chance spent. The bonus window is not one of them — when 165 seconds are gone the clock stops at zero, the bonus becomes nothing, and the boards carry on exactly as before. Grades come from your matches and nothing else: the share of judgements that were right, plus 0.05 once your longest streak reaches ten — so a slow player who matches all twelve still earns the top grade and simply banks no time bonus. A round that ran out of chances counts every pair it never reached as a miss, which is what separates stopping at eight pairs from stopping at eleven.
Reloading puts you back on the board you left, with your score, streak, chances and remaining bonus time carried over — and, if you had just mismatched, the line that explained it. The clock stops the moment you leave the page, so waiting a while and then reloading gives back the time that was actually left rather than the time at your last match. The result page lists all twelve pairs with their full definitions and the line that tells each one from its neighbour, and names the spare definition on every board. Progress and your best score live in this browser only.
English and Chinese are written separately rather than translated, and the two banks line up term for term — so a shared round link deals the same round in either language, and switching language halfway through keeps the round you were playing. Terms that only mean something under one country's rules are excluded by a rule in the code rather than by care: disclosure labels such as APR, APY and AER, named retirement accounts, deposit-protection limits and tax tables are refused outright. What is left is the mathematics, which is the same everywhere.
The tag price describes the pack; dividing by weight or count restates it per gram or item, which is the figure a bigger box has to beat.
Source: Unit price = price / quantity
The headline rate says nothing about how often interest is added. Fold the compounding frequency in and the yearly cost changes.
Source: Effective rate restates a nominal rate for compounding frequency
Simple interest always works on the original principal; compound interest moves earlier interest into the base, so the base itself grows.
Source: Interest on principal against interest on principal plus interest
Gross stops at direct costs, operating stops before interest and tax, and net stops at nothing. Comparing across them compares different questions.
Source: Income statement subtotals
Allocation decides how much sits in each class of investment; diversification spreads holdings inside a class. Neither removes the risk of a whole market falling.
Source: Idiosyncratic risk against market risk
Prices rising more slowly is still prices rising. Only a falling price level is deflation, and it has the opposite effect on debts.
Source: Direction of the price level against its rate of change
A positive rate can still be a loss of purchasing power, because the goods the money buys have moved too.
Source: Real ≈ nominal − inflation; rates unstated
The record is the history of how debts were repaid; the limit is a ceiling a lender set from it. One describes the past, the other bounds the present.
Source: Repayment history against granted borrowing ceiling
A password is one factor and is often reused. A second proof means a phished password on its own no longer opens the account.
Source: Single factor against two independent factors
Promising that an investment cannot lose is the sales line. Paying earlier investors with new deposits is the machinery that collapses when inflows stop.
Source: Promised return against source of payments
Term Match is a free browser game about the financial terms people mix up. A round deals three boards of four terms against five one-line definitions, and it ends when all twelve pairs are matched or the fourth wrong guess is spent. The terms are drawn from spending, borrowing and protection, investing, the economy, and scams, and a round takes two to three minutes.
The bank holds sixty terms in twenty-five confusable clusters across five areas: spending, borrowing and protection, investing, the economy, and scams. The pairs it drills include list against unit price, nominal against effective rates, simple against compound interest, the three margin lines, diversification against asset allocation, disinflation against deflation, purchasing power against real return, a credit limit against a credit record, a password against two-step verification, and a guaranteed return against a Ponzi scheme. Terms that only mean something under one country's rules are excluded.
Near-synonyms usually differ in exactly one respect, and that respect is what this game drills. A nominal rate leaves compounding frequency out of the figure and an effective annual rate folds it in, so the same headline number can describe two different yearly costs. Term Match deals both of a pair in the same round and lists the distinguishing line on the result page.
Disinflation is prices rising more slowly; deflation is the price level actually falling. What differs is the direction, not only the speed, which is why the two do opposite things to a debt: deflation makes a fixed repayment heavier in real terms and disinflation does not. The two sit in one confusable cluster in the bank, so when one of them is a term on the board the other's definition can be the spare one below it.
It is free and needs no account. The game runs entirely in your browser, your score and progress are stored on your own device, and nothing is uploaded. English and Chinese are both available, and the game can be added to a phone's home screen and played offline once it has been opened.
Because without it the last pair would be free. Four terms against four definitions can be finished by elimination, which measures patience rather than knowledge. The fifth definition belongs to a close neighbour of a term on the board and is kept off the board on purpose, so even the final pair has two plausible candidates.
No. The 165-second window only pays a bonus: 15 points for each whole second left, and only if all twelve pairs are matched. When it reaches zero the clock stops there and the round carries on. The only way to lose is to spend all four chances, and the grade is worked out from your matches alone — accuracy, plus 0.05 for a longest streak of ten or more — so reading slowly costs points and never a grade.
Yes. The share text carries a deal link, and opening it deals exactly the same twelve pairs in the same order. Because the English and Chinese banks line up term for term, the link produces the same round in either language — and switching language in the middle of a round keeps the round you were playing rather than starting a new one.
