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 flickers over the swatch throughout the two-and-a-half second flash, alternating with a plain square every 0.6 seconds. 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.