Color game: guess the color from memory

Color Recall is a color guessing game that tests your color memory. A color fills the screen for a few seconds, then disappears. Your job is to bring it back from memory using three bars for hue, saturation and lightness. Five colors make a game, the viewing time gets shorter as you go, and you can play as many games as you like for free.

How scoring works

Each color is worth up to 100 points. Hue, saturation and lightness are convenient for picking colors, but equal steps on those bars do not look equally different to your eye. So the game converts both colors into Oklab, a color space designed so that distances match perceived differences, and scores the distance between them.

An exact match earns 100. Close matches lose only a few points, and the score falls faster as the colors drift apart. The game curve is 100 × [1 − (distance ÷ 0.4)^1.35], rounded and kept between 0 and 100. It is a game score, not a measure of your vision. You can read about the color space in Oklab’s original description.

Hue, saturation and lightness, explained

The three bars use HSL, a common way to describe colors on screens and in CSS.

Hue: the color family

Hue is a position around a color wheel, measured in degrees from 0 to 360.

0° is red, 60° is yellow, 120° is green, 180° is cyan, 240° is blue, 300° is magenta, 360° is red.

The wheel wraps around, so 359° is right next to 0°. In the game the hue bar runs from red at the bottom, through yellow, green, cyan, blue and magenta, back to red at the top.

Saturation: how vivid

Saturation runs from 0%, a pure gray, to 100%, the most vivid version of the hue. Muted tones like sage, slate and dusty rose all have low saturation.

Lightness: how light or dark

Lightness runs from 0%, black, to 100%, white. The purest form of a hue sits at 50%. Pastels are high lightness; deep shades like navy and burgundy are low.

How to remember a color better

Name it while you look

A short description, said in your head while the color is visible, is easier to hold than the image. “A muted green with a bit of blue, fairly dark” gives you all three bars at once: hue, saturation and lightness.

Rebuild in order

Set the hue first, because it decides the color family. Then set lightness, which is the easiest to compare by eye. Finish with saturation, the subtlest of the three.

Watch the extremes

Very light and very dark colors hide their hue. If the original was nearly white or nearly black, get lightness right before you worry about hue; for those colors it matters most.

Learn from the reveal

After each round, compare the two halves. If your rebuilds keep coming out too vivid, or too dark, that pattern is your bias. Correct for it in the next round.

The later rounds are shorter

The first two colors stay on screen for five seconds, the last two for three. The early colors are also more vivid; later ones can be muted, light or dark, which are harder to describe and to remember.

Color memory, color matching and color guessing

These names describe different games. In a color matching game, the target stays on screen while you adjust your guess, so you are testing your eye. In a color memory game, like this one, the target disappears first, so you are testing what you remember. A color guessing game can mean either. Memory is harder: once the color is gone, there is nothing left to compare against.

Ways to train your color memory

• Guess the numbers around you. Look at a color in a photo or on a website and guess its hue, saturation and lightness. Then check it with any color picker. A few minutes a day sharpens your sense of what each bar does.
• Play the daily challenge with a friend. You both get the same five colors on the same date, so you can compare which colors fooled you.
• Describe before you match. In design work, write a short description of a color before reaching for the picker. It trains the same habit this game rewards.
• Practice the hard ones. Muted, very light and very dark colors are where most points are lost. Paying extra attention to them pays off fastest.

A note about screens

Color Recall compares the color values your browser displays. Brightness, night modes, blue-light filters and display calibration all change how colors look, but they change the original and your rebuild in the same way, so the game stays fair on any one screen. For the most consistent results, turn off night mode and play at a comfortable brightness. Color vision varies from person to person, and this game is not a test of it.

Questions about Color Recall

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