The free memory game for kids and groups What’s Missing?

How to play What's Missing?

What's Missing? is a memory game for any number of players, from one curious kid to a whole classroom. All you need is a screen that everyone can see.

1. 1Gather everyone around the screen. If you want the app to keep score, set Keep score to On and add player names.
2. 2Start a round. A set of 8 to 16 words appears on colored tiles.
3. 3Study them for 20 seconds. No writing anything down.
4. 4The words disappear, then come back shuffled with one word missing. Sometimes two are gone.
5. 5The first player to call out the missing word gets the point. Tap their name to give it to them.
6. 6Each new level adds more words and gives you less time to study them.

Play a few levels, or keep going until nobody can keep up. If you're keeping score, the player with the most points at the end wins.

Word sets

The tiles come from themed sets of short, everyday words: things in the kitchen, animals, toys and games, food, nature, school, clothes and travel. Simple words keep it fair for early readers. The full lists are below, handy if you want to run the classic tray version at home with real objects.

Scoring and levels

Scoring is optional. If you just want to play, call out the answers and move on. If your group likes a contest, turn on Keep score, add names and tap whoever got it first after each round. The app keeps the totals.

The game gets harder as you go: more tiles to remember and less time to study them. The first levels are gentle enough for young kids. The later ones will make grown-ups squint.

Settle ties before you start. A simple house rule: if two people say it at the same moment, both get the point. With mixed ages, let younger kids answer first and have adults count to three before they speak.

Memory tips that actually help

• Group the words. If you see apple, sock, banana and hat, think “two foods, two clothes.” A gap is easier to spot in a small group.
• Make up a silly story that links the words: the cat put on a hat and rode the bus. When a word disappears, the story breaks.
• Say the words in your head once or twice. Hearing them, even silently, helps them stick.
• Notice first letters. If three words started with B and now only two do, you have your answer.
• Sweep the whole set a couple of times instead of memorizing the first row perfectly.
• With young kids, read the tiles out loud together before the time runs out. It turns into reading practice too.

Ways to play

Where it works best

In classrooms, it's a quick brain break and a natural fit for vocabulary and memory work. Put it on the classroom screen and the whole room can play at once.

For family night, it's easy enough for a kid who can read short words and hard enough at later levels that the grown-ups start to sweat.

On road trips, a passenger can hold up the phone for the back seat. Keep the driver out of it and their eyes on the road.

On a video call, share your screen and let everyone shout the answer. Grandparents across the country can play along, and the host taps whoever said it first.

From Kim's Game to your phone

What's Missing? is based on a memory game that's more than a century old. It's usually called Kim's Game, after Rudyard Kipling's 1901 novel Kim. In the book, a jeweler named Lurgan trains young Kim to notice details: he scatters a handful of jewels on a tray, lets Kim look, then covers them and asks what was there. Kipling calls it the Play of the Jewels.

Robert Baden-Powell put the game in Scouting for Boys in 1908 under the name Kim's Game: twenty or thirty small objects on a tray, uncovered for one minute, then each Scout names everything they can remember. Scout groups still play it today.

The version most kids know is simpler: instead of listing everything, you find the one thing that's gone. Teachers do it with trays of classroom objects. We use words on tiles, so all you need is a screen.

Questions