Color game: match, guess, rush

Three ways to play

Match. This is the color matching mode. A target swatch appears next to your own color. Move the hue, saturation and lightness sliders until the two look the same, then press Check my match. Your swatch updates as you drag.

Guess the HEX. Look at the target and type the six-digit HEX code you think it is. Your guess appears beside the target as you type. Press Enter to check, and Enter again for the next color.

Color rush. A timed odd-one-out. A grid of identical tiles hides one that is slightly off; tap it and a new, bigger grid appears with a smaller difference. You have 60 seconds, and a wrong tap takes 3 of them away.

Match and Guess HEX have five rounds each. After every round you see the real HEX code, your score, a plain-English verdict and a hint about what was off, such as "the target is lighter" or "the target hue is about 30° higher on the wheel".

Daily and practice colors

Daily colors are the same for everyone on the same day. They are generated from the date in UTC, so a new set arrives at midnight UTC, which falls in the evening in the Americas and the morning in Asia. Each game mode has its own daily set. Once you finish, your result is saved in your browser and shown again if you come back the same day.

Practice gives a fresh random set every time, as often as you like.

At the end, Copy result puts a short summary on your clipboard with your total and one square per round (■ 90+, ▣ 70+, □ below), handy for sharing in a group chat without giving away the colors.

How color rush gets harder

The first grid is 2 × 2 and the odd tile is about ΔE 24 away from the rest, which anyone can see at a glance. After each find the difference shrinks by 13% and every second find adds a row and a column:

On a phone the grid stops at 6 × 6 so each tile stays at least 44 pixels wide, big enough to tap without hitting a neighbor. The hidden tile differs in a random mix of lightness and hue each time, so you can't train yourself to look only for a darker square.

In our own test runs, 16 finds in a minute meant spotting a difference of ΔE 3.0, small enough that most people would call two such colors the same if they saw them apart. The end screen tells you the finest difference you caught and keeps your best score on this device. In daily mode everyone gets the same sequence of colors that day, so scores are comparable.

Two habits help more than speed:

• Unfocus slightly. Look at the middle of the grid rather than scanning tile by tile. The odd one tends to "pop" in peripheral vision.
• Don't guess. At 3 seconds a miss, one wrong tap costs more than a careful second look.

How scoring works

Your color and the target are compared with CIEDE2000 (ΔE), the formula the color industry uses to measure how different two colors look to a typical observer. Unlike a simple RGB distance, it weighs lightness, saturation and hue differences separately, the way our eyes do, and includes a correction for blues, where plain formulas go wrong.

In Match and Guess HEX, points per round are 100 − 2 × ΔE, never below zero:

A perfect game scores 500. Color rush is scored simply by the number of tiles found.

Getting better at sliders

1. Hue first. Get the color family right with the hue slider before anything else. A wrong hue costs the most points.
2. Then lightness. Squint at both swatches. If one looks heavier, adjust lightness until they balance.
3. Saturation last. Ask whether the target looks dusty or vivid compared with yours.
4. Look at the edge. Where the two swatches meet, small differences are easier to see.

Reading HEX by eye

A HEX code is three pairs, #RRGGBB, each from 00 (none) to FF (full). A few landmarks make guessing much easier:

• Equal pairs, such as #7A7A7A, are grays. The higher the value, the lighter.
• The biggest pair names the dominant color: #C0402A is mostly red.
• The smallest pair controls saturation. The closer it is to the biggest, the grayer the color.
• Mid-tones sit around 80 to A0. Pastels have every pair above about C0, and deep shades have every pair below about 60.

So a dusty teal might be #4F8F8A: green and blue high and close together, red lower.

Why your screen matters

Colors shift between screens, especially on budget laptops, older phones and with night modes on. Everyone sees the same target code, but not quite the same color. For fair comparisons with friends, turn off night modes and blue-light filters, and set brightness fairly high.

Related tools

To learn how HEX values map to colors, explore the hex color picker and press random in the random color generator. For a more demanding challenge in fine hue discrimination, try the hue test, and to check your color vision, take the color blind test.

FAQ

Why did I score badly when the colors looked identical?

Your screen may show them more alike than they are, or small lightness differences may be hidden by surrounding colors. Check the ΔE number: below 2, almost nobody can see a difference.

Can I play the daily colors again?

Your result is shown again for the rest of the day. Practice mode has no limit.