Free-for-all with debuffs. Spend tokens to mess with opponents each round.
Ready when you are
Sabotage is multiplayer-only. Three or more players, fifteen rounds, a token economy, and six different debuffs you can stack on your opponents to mess up their guesses. It’s the most social variant we’ve built — closer to a card game than a memory test.
Every round, players see the target color and start dialing as usual. Before the round resolves, each player can secretly spend tokens to apply debuffs to opponents. Squint blurs the target. Shuffle randomises slider positions. Blackout briefly hides the preview. Decoy swaps in a fake target. Lock disables a slider for the round. Rush halves the round timer. Tokens come from winning rounds (the closest guess takes the pot) and from accuracy (a small bonus for high CIEDE2000 scores). Spend too aggressively and you run out; sit on tokens and you lose ground to players who do play the meta-game.
The sweet spot is debuff trading: target whoever’s leading and force them to spend tokens defending. Squint and Shuffle are cheap and broadly annoying — good for early-round pressure. Lock and Rush are expensive but devastating in late rounds when the leaderboard tightens. Save Blackout for opponents who lean on the live preview; save Decoy for confident players who’ll lock in fast on what they think they saw. The win usually goes to the player with the best tempo — not the best eye.
Round wins translate into tokens, not points directly, so the scoreboard is a mix of raw color accuracy and round-win count. The fifteen-round arc is long enough that a single bad round doesn’t wreck a run; it’s short enough that early leads compound. Sabotage isn’t a great variant for solo training — the whole point is the social game-theory layer. Bring at least three players who’ll play with intent and you’ll find it’s the most replayable mode in the set.
