Color games online: test your eye and your memory
Can you remember the exact blue of a sky you saw eight seconds ago? Color games are surprisingly hard, and surprisingly addictive. Here’s how they work and which to try.
Color games have exploded in popularity, and for good reason. They look simple, anyone can play them, and they reveal something surprising: most of us are much worse at colors than we think. Here are the main kinds of color games, why they’re hard, and how to get better.
Types of color games
Color memory games
You see a color, or a whole scene, for a few seconds. It disappears. Then you rebuild it from memory. These are the hardest kind, because you can’t compare against the original. Daily Recall’s Hue is one: study a scene like a sunset or a fruit bowl for eight seconds, rebuild its five colors with sliders, then see your version next to the real one.
Play Hue, the daily color memory gameHue · free · no sign-upColor matching games
You’re shown a target color and adjust sliders or pick from options until yours matches. Because you can still see the target, it’s a test of your eye rather than your memory, and a good warm-up.
Gradient and sorting puzzles
Tiles of color are shuffled, and you rearrange them into a smooth gradient. Relaxing rather than tense, and great for training your eye for small differences.
Odd-one-out games
A grid of squares that look identical, except one is very slightly different. Each level makes the difference smaller.
Why color games are so hard
Seeing and remembering are different. Side by side, your eyes can separate a huge number of colors. From memory, you keep far less: mostly a category, like “blue”, plus a rough sense of the shade.
Memory drifts toward typical. Remembered colors tend to slide toward the most typical example of their category. An unusual violet-blue sky gets remembered as an ordinary sky blue.
Three things change at once. Every color has a hue (where it sits on the rainbow), a saturation (how vivid it is) and a brightness (how light or dark). Most people only notice the hue, and most mistakes are actually in saturation and brightness.
Our color memory test guide goes deeper into the research, and how Hue scores colors the way the human eye sees them.
How to get better at color games
Name the color precisely. Not “green” but “dusty sage” or “neon lime”. Precise names hold more detail.
Check all three dimensions. Before a color disappears, ask: which hue, how vivid, how light?
Compare within the scene. Is the sun lighter than the sand? Is the sea more vivid than the sky? Relationships are easier to remember than exact values.
Play a little every day. A daily color game, with a new scene each day, is enough to notice yourself improving.
Color games and color blindness
Roughly 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women have some form of color vision deficiency. Color games can still be fun, since brightness and saturation carry a lot of the score, but they’re not a test for color blindness. If you think your color vision is different, an eye doctor or optometrist can test it properly.
More color inspiration
If color games hook you, you might enjoy Interaction of Color by Josef Albers, a classic on how colors change depending on what’s next to them. It’s in our list of the best memory books.
Frequently asked questions
What is the hardest color game?
Color memory games are usually the hardest, because you have to rebuild a color after it disappears. Matching a color you can still see is much easier.
Why are color games so hard?
Your eyes can tell very similar colors apart side by side, but memory stores colors roughly, as categories like “teal” or “orange”, and fills in the rest with typical shades.
Can color games test for color blindness?
No. Online color games are for fun. Color vision can only be properly tested by an eye doctor or optometrist.