Alpha Pairs Is Out Now for the NES

Flip the cubes. Find the pairs. Spell the words.

Every matching pair you find drops a letter onto your rack. Spell a word from your letters and press PLAY: longer words and rarer letters score more, and matching pairs without a miss builds your streak all the way up to 20X.

Every level is a new board with its own shape and colors, and each one is bigger and trickier than the last.

Keep your letters out of his mouth

Your rack only holds six letters. Win one more and Alphy gobbles up your oldest. Meanwhile your energy meter drains when you dawdle, guess a word that isn’t real, or forget a cube you’ve already seen. Spell words and clear boards to fill it back up, or it’s GAME OVER.

Sixty seconds. Every letter counts.

Clear five boards and the board turns into WORD RUSH: 60 seconds to spell as many words as you can while new letters keep coming. Every word earns tokens for REVEAL, SUGGEST and BOMB on the road ahead.

A real NES game

Alpha Pairs is an MMC3 game of 512 KB, with a battery-backed high score table, 29,872 words packed into the ROM, an original chiptune soundtrack and a built-in tutorial.

It plays on a real NES with a flash cartridge (we test on the EverDrive N8 Pro) and in emulators such as Mesen, FCEUX and OpenEmu. Buy it once and keep it: the download is a DRM-free .nes ROM.