1/5
Easy
Ready
Solo Easy is the format every other variant in the game derives from. A countdown reads Ready, Set, Go, the target colour fills the screen for four seconds, then disappears. Three sliders appear — hue, saturation, brightness — along with a live preview of your current guess. Dial it to match what you saw, submit, and see your score. Five rounds, 50 points possible.
Each round picks a random colour from across the full HSV space, with a soft bias away from extremes (pure black, pure white, fully saturated colours) so the targets stay interesting rather than trivial. The four-second flash is long enough for your visual system to fully resolve the colour but short enough that you can’t coast on continuous viewing — you have to commit it to memory rather than just look harder. The live preview during the guess phase shows your current dial as a swatch, so you can compare what you remember against what you’re building.
Two habits raise scores quickly. First, encode the colour as words — even a sloppy verbal label (“deep teal, fairly bright”) survives memory longer than a wordless visual impression. Second, tune hue first. Most of the points live in the hue channel, and dialling saturation and brightness before you’ve found the right hue family wastes the time-starved part of the round. Lock the hue, then refine saturation, then refine brightness — that order matters more than people expect.
We score every guess with 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. The per-round score runs from 0 to 10 on a sigmoid curve, with a recovery bonus for nailing the hue and a penalty for missing it on vivid colours. Five rounds, 50 points. A 40+ run takes a steady eye; a 45+ takes deliberate practice.