Color Memory Game is a free browser game that turns the science of color perception into a daily test of memory and intuition. We flash a color (or several), and you try to recreate it from memory using three sliders — hue, saturation, and value. There’s no signup, no account, no app to install, and the whole thing works on a phone, a tablet, or a laptop. It’s an independent project built and maintained by one person rather than a company — and this page is where you can read who that is, how the game works under the hood, and how to reach us.
Who builds this
Color Memory Game is built and maintained by John Kyprianou, an independent maker. It’s a one-person project: I build it, I maintain it, and I read the email that comes in.
I started it as a weekend experiment out of an interest in color and perception — a simple question about how accurately someone can remember a color and then reproduce it from memory. I’m not a color scientist by training; I’m an independent enthusiast who got interested in the perception side of it and learned the rest while making the game work.
I also write and oversee the articles on the blog, which are published under the short byline “John K.” If you follow that byline, it’s me. You can reach me directly at info@colormemorygame.com — bug reports, variant ideas, and corrections are all genuinely welcome.
How to play
A color flashes on screen for a moment, then disappears. Your job is to bring it back from memory: you drag three sliders — hue, saturation, and value — until the swatch you’re building matches the one you just saw. When you’re happy with it, you lock in your guess, and the game scores how close you got. A full round is five colors, and your scores add up across them.
That’s the whole loop, and most of the variants are just different twists on it — less time to look, no live preview, a slider that won’t move. The skill it trains is the same one designers and painters spend years on: holding a color in your head accurately enough to reproduce it.
Why we built it
Color is something most people use every day without ever measuring it. Designers, painters, photographers, and artists spend years training their eyes to tell the difference between a warm grey and a cool one, or between two reds that look identical until you put them side by side. I wanted a quick, repeatable way for anyone to measure that skill — and to watch it improve over a few rounds, not a few years.
The first version was built over a weekend. After showing it to a few friends and watching them argue over near-misses, the project grew into a full set of variants and a daily challenge that anyone in the world can play against the same target colors at the same time. I still add variants and fix things as I go.
How the scoring works
Most color games score by comparing individual RGB channels — how far apart the raw red, green, and blue numbers are. We wanted something more honest, so the game scores with CIEDE2000, the perceptual color-difference formula recommended by the International Commission on Illumination (the CIE).
The difference matters more than it sounds. RGB distance treats all of color space as if it were evenly spaced, but human vision isn’t even — we’re far more sensitive to small shifts in some hues (greens, for example) than others, and our sensitivity to lightness and saturation differs again. CIEDE2000 corrects for that with weighting terms built from how people actually perceive color, so it measures how different two colors look to a human observer rather than how different their numbers are. Two greens with the same RGB distance can feel worlds apart to your eyes; CIEDE2000 reflects that, which makes a low score in this game mean what you’d intuitively want it to mean — your guess genuinely looks close.
On top of CIEDE2000 the timed variants add a small time bonus, so a quick, close guess beats a slow, near-perfect one. The Arena and Daily modes run the exact same scoring system for every player, which is what keeps the leaderboard fair.
The variants
Solo is the classic mode: see the color, then dial it back from memory. From there we built variants that strip away or add constraints — a one-second flash in Speed, no live preview in Blind Sliders, a single locked slider in Broken Slider, two-color targets in Gradient, sequence recall in Memory Stack, and an “odd one out” puzzle in Imposter. Multiplayer rooms add Sabotage, where you debuff your opponents, and Color Whispers, a chain of guesses that drift further from the original as they pass from player to player.
Each one is built around the same core idea — close the gap between what you remember and what was actually there — but they pressure-test different parts of that skill: short-term recall, reading sliders without feedback, and reasoning about color relationships rather than single swatches.
Daily challenge & multiplayer
The Daily challenge uses a deterministic seed tied to the calendar date, so everyone who plays today plays the same five colors. Your score is comparable to anyone else’s — there’s no luck-of-the-draw advantage, and no way to reroll into an easier set.
Multiplayer rooms run live over Supabase Realtime: a host generates a short code, friends join from their own devices, and rounds resolve simultaneously so everyone reveals at once. It’s designed to work with nothing more than a browser and a shared link.
Privacy & feedback
We collect as little as possible. Leaderboard nicknames and scores are stored so the boards work; beyond what the privacy policy describes, the game itself doesn’t ask for an account or any personal details. The full breakdown — what’s stored, why, for how long, and any analytics or advertising data — is in the privacy policy.
If you spot a bug, want a new variant, or have a partnership idea, email me at info@colormemorygame.com or use the contact page. Real feedback from players is most of how the game has improved, so it always gets read.