Every Color Memory Game variant explained: a complete how-to-play guide

The Color Memory Game started as one mode — see a colour, recreate it from memory with three sliders — and grew into a family of variants that twist that single idea in different directions. Some shorten the flash. Some hide the live preview. Some give you a deliberately broken tool. Some put you in a room with friends who can sabotage your sliders. They all share the same scoring engine and the same goal, but each one tests something slightly different about how your eye and short-term memory cooperate.

This guide walks through every variant currently in the game. For each one you’ll find the rules, the scoring, and a paragraph or two on how to actually play well — what trips most people up and what closes the gap between an average run and a great one.

The shared core

Before the variants: every mode in the game uses the same HSV slider system to express a guess. H is hue (the colour family — red, yellow, green, etc.), S is saturation (how vivid the colour is, from grey at 0 to pure colour at 100), and V is value or brightness (from black at 0 to full brightness at 100).

Scoring uses CIEDE2000, the perceptual colour difference formula recommended by the International Commission on Illumination. CIEDE2000 measures how different two colours look to a human observer, not how different the underlying numbers are. A guess that’s “close in RGB” can still feel completely different to your eyes; CIEDE2000 reflects that, which is why our scores feel honest. The result of that comparison is mapped to a 0–10 score for the round. Five rounds, 50 points possible — except in the variants that change the maximum.

Solo — Easy

Solo Easy is the unmodified original. A countdown reads Ready, Set, Go, the target colour fills the screen for four seconds, then disappears. Three sliders appear, you dial them to recreate what you saw, and submit. Five rounds, 50 points. There’s a live preview of your current guess so you can compare what you remember against what you’re building in real time.

How to score well in Solo Easy

Almost everyone’s first instinct is to fiddle with all three sliders at once. Don’t. Lock in the hue first— most of your points live in the hue channel, and a wrong hue with perfect saturation and brightness still scores badly. Once the hue feels right, dial saturation, then brightness. The four-second flash is enough time to form one solid impression — try to walk away from each flash with a single sentence in your head: “deep teal, fairly bright”, “washed-out peach”, “pure mid-grey with a hint of warm”. Words survive memory better than pure visuals.

Solo — Hard

Solo Hard takes the four-second flash down to three and adds two adversarial elements. During the Ready–Set–Go countdown, three decoy colours flash on each word, deliberately close to the real target. While you’re guessing, the screen also shows a colour name (e.g. vermilion, periwinkle) chosen to nudge you in a slightly wrong direction. The idea is to scramble the priming your brain naturally does before a stimulus arrives.

How to score well in Solo Hard

Treat the decoys as noise — your brain will absorb them whether you like it or not, but you don’t have to react to them. The bigger trap is the colour name. If the word “cornflower” appears while you’re holding a memory of a teal, the word will pull your dial toward blue without your noticing. Fight that by trusting your visual memory and not the label. The three-second flash is short, but enough — make a decision in the first half-second of seeing the colour and stick to it.

Speed

Speed compresses the flash to one second and gives you a ten-second clock to dial your guess. You’re scored out of 12 per round instead of 10: the colour score is still 0–10, plus a time bonus of up to +2 for submitting early. An instant submit nets the full +2; using the entire ten seconds nets zero. Five rounds, max 60.

How to score well in Speed

Don’t rush the dial — rush the decision. Most players who score badly in Speed waste two or three seconds hesitating before they touch the sliders, then panic-tweak in the last second. A confident wrong guess submitted in three seconds usually beats a hesitant accurate one submitted in nine. Form your impression during the half-second the colour is most visible, commit the second the flash ends, and dial confidently.

Memory Stack

Memory Stack shows you a sequence instead of a single colour. Round 1 shows one colour. Round 2 shows two colours in a row. Round 3 shows three. By round 5 you’re watching five colours flash by and have to recreate them in order. Each colour you place is scored against its position in the original sequence.

How to score well in Memory Stack

This is the variant where verbal labels really shine. By round 3 or 4, you cannot hold every colour in pure visual memory; you have to encode them as words. “Mustard, dusty pink, navy, seafoam” survives a five-second gap; four pure visual impressions don’t. The flash on each colour is short, so practice naming colours quickly. A good colour vocabulary is the single biggest skill upgrade for Memory Stack.

Blind Sliders

Blind Sliders removes the live preview. You see the target for four seconds. After that, the sliders appear — but the swatch showing what you’ve currently dialled stays hidden until you submit. You have to dial entirely from your memory of the colour and your understanding of how the sliders move.

How to score well in Blind Sliders

Blind Sliders rewards calibration. Spend a few rounds in Solo Easy first to learn what hue 200 looks like vs hue 240, what saturation 70 looks like vs saturation 90 — then carry that mental map into Blind. Build the guess from memory of the slider positions, not from a guess at the colour. The score is unforgiving but the skill transfers: people who play Blind regularly become noticeably better in every other variant.

Gradient

Gradient shows a two-colour gradient as the target. You match both endpoints with two sets of HSV sliders. The score is the average of the two colour scores, so a brilliant guess at one end and a poor one at the other averages out.

How to score well in Gradient

Treat the gradient as two independent colour memory tasks, but encode them together as a relationship: “goes from warm pink to cool blue, with brightness increasing”. Remembering the trajectory makes both endpoints stickier than remembering them in isolation. Don’t spend all your time on one end — split your dialling effort evenly.

Broken Slider

Broken Slider locks one of the three sliders to a deliberately wrong value at the start of each round. You can’t move it; you have to compensate with the other two. If hue is locked but saturation and brightness still move, you’re forced to pick the closest possible match given an incorrect hue. The locked slider is shown clearly — you know which one is broken before you start dialling.

How to score well in Broken Slider

Accept the loss the broken slider forces on you and play the compensation game. If the broken slider is hue, you can’t match the colour family but you can match the apparent vividness and brightness, which still claws back a respectable score. If it’s saturation, push the hue and value into the closest feasible space and accept that you’ll be greyer or more saturated than the target. Most players underestimate how much can be recovered with the two working sliders.

Imposter

Imposter is the only mode that isn’t a recall task. You’re shown a grid of swatches — all but one are identical. Spot the imposter and tap it. The grid size grows each round, and the difference between the imposter and the rest gets subtler as you progress. Scored on speed and accuracy.

How to score well in Imposter

Don’t scan linearly — let your eye pick out the swatch that feels different. Human peripheral vision is excellent at identifying odd-one-out colour differences when you let it work without conscious focus. Defocus your gaze across the whole grid for a beat; the imposter will usually pop. If it doesn’t, the difference is in saturation rather than hue; tilt your head or look slightly off-centre to break the symmetry of your foveal view.

Daily challenge

The Daily challenge gives every player in the world the same five colours, seeded from the calendar date. The run is the standard Solo Easy format — four-second flash, three sliders, no decoys. You can post your score once per nickname per day to the daily leaderboard, where you’ll see what percentile you landed in. Rounds reset at midnight UTC.

How to score well in Daily

Don’t play Daily as your warm-up. The leaderboard rewards your best single run today, and you only get one entry per nickname. Play a few rounds of Solo Easy first to wake your eye up, then play Daily as a deliberate session. Pay extra attention to the first colour — most players score lowest on round one because they haven’t calibrated yet.

Challenge — vs celebrity bots

Challenge is a 1v1 against a roster of celebrity-themed bots. Each character plays a specific variant at their own skill level, with their own commentary between rounds. Trump and Asmongold play the easy variants at low accuracy. Speed bots like KSI, XQC, and Xaryu play increasingly tighter Speed rounds. Magnus Carlsen plays Blind Sliders at near-perfect accuracy. The bots taunt, gloat, and complain in character; the scoring is identical to the underlying variant.

How to score well in Challenge

Pick your fight. Bots are tier-labelled (Trivial, Easy, Medium, Hard, Genius) — that’s the bot’s skill, not the difficulty of the variant. A “Trivial” bot in Solo Easy is a lay-up; a “Genius” bot in Blind Sliders is genuinely hard to beat. Once you’ve found one you can consistently beat, work up the tiers. Wins and losses post to the per-character vs-bots leaderboard.

Arena — head-to-head

Arena is automated 1v1 matchmaking. You queue, get paired with another human, and play five rounds of Solo Easy at the same time. Whoever scores higher wins the match. There’s no chat — both players see only their own slider and the round outcome. It’s the closest thing to ranked play in the game.

How to score well in Arena

Play your own game. The temptation in head-to-head is to rush because your opponent might be rushing — don’t. Arena doesn’t reward speed; it rewards the higher absolute score across five rounds. Take your full four seconds on the flash, dial deliberately, submit when you’re happy. Most Arena losses come from one wildly off round, not a slightly slower set.

Color Whispers (multiplayer)

Color Whispers is “telephone” played with colours. Three or more players sit in a chain. The first player sees the target, dials a guess, and submits. The second player sees only the first player’s guess, dials their own version of it from memory, and passes it on. By the end of the chain, the colour has drifted — sometimes a lot. Everyone in the chain sees the original target and the full chain at the end, and scores are based on how close each player’s guess is to the person before them, not to the original.

How to score well in Color Whispers

Match the input you were given, not the colour you think the original was. Trying to “correct” what you assume is already a drifted version usually drifts it further. Treat your round as a normal Solo round with whatever swatch you were shown as the target.

Sabotage (multiplayer)

Sabotage is a free-for-all where every player picks a debuff to apply to one opponent each round. The debuffs include a slider lock, a hue inversion, a smaller preview window, a shortened flash, or a colour-name distractor. You’re both trying to score well and trying to slow down whoever’s leading. The leaderboard at the end is straight cumulative score, with debuffs only affecting that round.

How to score well in Sabotage

Read the room. If you’re leading, expect the worst debuffs to come at you and play conservatively — accept lower-variance rounds and don’t do anything that lets a single bad round tank your lead. If you’re trailing, target the leader with the slider-lock debuff (which costs them the most) and swing for high scores yourself. The meta-game matters as much as the colour accuracy.

Tips that apply everywhere

Three habits raise your scores across every variant. Calibrate your monitor — at the very least, turn off any night-shift / blue-light filter while you play, and make sure the room isn’t lit by anything heavily tinted (warm bulbs and direct sun both shift your perception). Encode colours as words — even a sloppy verbal label survives memory better than a pure visual impression. Always tune hue first — it’s where most of the points live, and dialling saturation and brightness before you’ve found the right hue family wastes time.

If you’ve been playing one variant exclusively, try a couple of rounds of Blind Sliders — it forces you to internalise what each slider position looks like, and the calibration carries over to every other mode.