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 two and a half. 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. And while the target itself is on screen, a colour name that has nothing to do with it — Mustard, say, over a blue — sits on top of the swatch, fighting the label your memory wants to write. Five rounds, 50 points, same scoring as Easy.
The decoys aren’t near-misses. Each one is generated to sit clearly apart from the real target — the game rejects any candidate within a CIEDE2000 distance of 15 — so the trap isn’t telling similar shades apart, it’s the pile of unrelated colours your eyes absorb before the one that counts arrives. The name is the second layer: it’s drawn from a fixed list of 32 colour names (Mustard, Turquoise, Crimson, Sage Green) chosen with no relation to the target, and it overlays the swatch for the whole two-and-a-half second flash. That’s Stroop-style interference — a word contradicting the colour it’s printed on — aimed at the exact moment you’re trying to memorise the target.
Treat the decoys as noise — they’re gone by the time the target arrives, and trying to ignore them actively wastes attention. The real trap is the name printed over the target. Your memory naturally stores a verbal label alongside the visual impression, and the game hands you a wrong one at the moment of encoding. Beat it by naming the colour yourself during the flash — “dark teal, a bit washed out” — so your own words crowd out the printed ones. Two and a half seconds is enough to form a confident impression if you commit early. By the time the sliders appear the name is gone; what’s left is whichever label won.
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.