The full guide
How the color memory game works
The color memory game is built around a single repeating loop. A random color fills the screen, stays for a few seconds, then vanishes. You’re left with three sliders — hue, saturation, brightness — and a live preview swatch. Drag the sliders until your preview matches the color you just saw, lock it in, and the game shows your target side-by-side with your guess plus a per-round score. Five rounds make a match, fifty points are the ceiling, and the per-round score is the only thing that decides where you land on the leaderboard.
The three sliders, in order of importance
Hue is the color family — red through orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, and back to red. Hue is where most of the points live, and it’s the channel your memory holds onto best, so dial it first. If your hue is wrong by more than a step on the rainbow, the other two sliders can’t save the round.
Saturation is how vivid or how grey a color looks. Pure colors sit at the top of the slider, washed-out and muddy colors sit at the bottom. Memory tends to bias toward more saturated than the original — most new players overshoot here.
Brightness is how dark or light the color is. Pure black sits at the bottom, full brightness at the top. A common mistake is leaving brightness at the default midpoint when the target was actually quite dark or quite light; checking the swatch against your visual memory before submitting catches this most of the time.
How a round is scored
Every guess is compared to the target with the CIEDE2000 perceptual color-difference formula — the same standard the International Commission on Illumination publishes for measuring how different two colors look to a human observer. CIEDE2000 is specifically designed to track perceptual difference, not raw numeric distance, so the score you see roughly matches how off your guess looks rather than how off the underlying values are.
The per-round score is mapped onto a 0–10 sigmoid. A 10 means the guess is visually indistinguishable from the target. A 7 or 8 means a small but visible miss. Below 5 the colors look clearly different. There’s a small recovery bonus for nailing the hue and a small penalty for missing it on vivid colors, since hue errors are far more noticeable than equally sized saturation errors.
A worked example
Say the target is a deep teal: hue around 175, saturation around 70, brightness around 55. The flash disappears and you sit down to dial. The right first move is to lock the hue slider somewhere in the blue-green family — even being a few degrees off in the right family is worth more than being perfect on the wrong family. Once the hue feels right, work the saturation down from the default until it stops looking cartoonish, then settle the brightness. Submit. If you landed around hue 178, saturation 65, brightness 52, the round scores in the high 8s.
The most common error path is dialling saturation first while the hue is still set to the default red. The preview looks wrong, you panic, you spend the rest of the time chasing the wrong family. Hue first, every time.
Tips that raise scores quickly
- Encode the color as words during the flash — a sloppy verbal label like “deep teal, fairly bright” survives in short-term memory longer than a wordless visual impression.
- Tune hue first, then saturation, then brightness. Don’t touch a slider out of order.
- Trust your visual memory over any color name shown during Hard mode — the label is chosen to mislead.
- Don’t over-dial in the last second. If the preview already feels right, lock it in.
- If you keep missing hue, slow down and look harder during the flash. Most hue misses come from poor encoding, not poor dialling.
Game modes at a glance
Solo Easy is the format described above. Solo Hard cuts the look to three seconds, adds decoy colors during the countdown, and shows a misleading color name during your guess phase. Daily is a five-round Easy match against a fixed set of colors shared by every player that UTC day. Arena is matchmade multiplayer head-to-head. The Variants page collects everything else — Blind, Speed, Gradient, Match, Imposter, Memory Stack, Broken Slider, Color Whispers, and Sabotage — each of which tweaks one part of the loop to test a different sub-skill.
What a good score looks like
On Solo Easy, anything above 35 out of 50 is a steady-eye run. A 40+ takes a player who’s warmed up. A 45+ is deliberate practice territory. On Solo Hard, the same scores mean noticeably more, because the decoys and the color name are actively eroding your encoding. A 35 on Hard is usually a stronger run than a 45 on Easy, which is why the leaderboard tracks the two modes separately.
