One slider's stuck. Compensate with the other two.
Ready when you are
Broken Slider is a constraint puzzle. Each round, one of the three HSV sliders is locked at the wrong value and you can’t move it. You compensate with the other two and try to land as close to the target as the constraint will allow.
After the four-second flash of the target, you’re handed the slider rig with one slider already disabled — its position is fixed somewhere away from the truth. You can move the other two freely. The challenge is that hue, saturation, and value aren’t independent perceptually: shifting hue changes how saturated a color reads, and reducing value drags everything towards black. Compensating for a broken slider is partly a math problem and partly a feel problem — you’re looking for the closest reachable color rather than the actual target.
Look at the broken slider before you move anything else. If hue is locked too far towards red and the target is teal, you can’t reach the target — you can only reach the closest thing on the wrong side of the wheel. Once you accept that, move saturation and value to compensate visually rather than mathematically. A common mistake is to keep value pegged to the target’s value when the right move is to drop value to make the wrong hue look less wrong.
Perfect 10s are nearly impossible because the broken slider almost always introduces irrecoverable error. Scoring uses CIEDE2000 like the other modes, so partial credit reflects how close you got under the constraint. Anyone who consistently scores 7+ across all five rounds has a real understanding of how the HSV sliders interact — most players cluster between 4 and 6 per round. Five rounds, 50 points possible.