1/5
Hard
Ready
Solo Hard is the standard memory game with three deliberate obstacles bolted on. The flash is shortened from four seconds to three. During the Ready–Set–Go countdown, three decoy colours flash on each word to scramble the priming your visual system normally does before a stimulus arrives. While you’re dialling your guess, a colour name appears on screen — chosen to nudge you toward a plausible-but-wrong hue. Five rounds, 50 points, same scoring as Easy.
The decoys aren’t random. They’re generated to sit close to the real target in colour space — close enough to interfere with your memory, far enough that picking one of them costs you points. The colour name shown during your guess is similarly “adjacent” — if the target is a teal, the name might be cornflower or periwinkle rather than something that obviously doesn’t fit. The goal is to put pressure on the verbal label your memory naturally attaches to the colour.
Treat the decoys as noise — they’ll be absorbed by your visual system anyway, and trying to ignore them actively wastes attention. The real trap is the colour name during the guess phase. If the word doesn’t match what you remember seeing, trust the visual memory and not the label. Three seconds is enough to form a confident impression if you commit early. Players who lose Hard rounds usually do so because they second-guess in the last half second of dialling, when the colour name is still on screen doing its work.
Identical to Solo Easy: each round is scored 0–10 by CIEDE2000, with five rounds totalling 50. There’s no bonus or penalty for the difficulty — your score is the score, and that’s what makes Hard a fair benchmark against Easy. A 35+ on Hard is usually a stronger run than a 45 on Easy, and the leaderboard tracks the two modes separately for that reason.