about
off colors
Color memory is unreliable in a way most people find surprising. You can look at a swatch for five seconds, lose it, and land forty degrees of hue away when you try to put it back. This is a small game built around that gap.
Difficulty
- Easy — 5s to study. Generous scoring — near misses still pay.
- Hard — 3s to study. Half the time, and near misses start to cost you.
- Brutal — 1.5s to study. A glance, and only precision scores.
Scoring
Every round produces a normalized error between 0 (exact) and 1 (as wrong as the dials allow). That error is raised to a falloff exponent which steepens with difficulty, so a near miss is worth a lot on Easy and very little on Brutal.
score = (1 − error) ^ falloff × 10
Hue is weighted by the target's saturation. Missing the hue of a near-gray barely costs you, because a near-gray hardly has one.
Reading the result
The two colors meet edge to edge with no gap and no border between them. Color judgement is relative, and any seam would give your eye an excuse. Under them, each channel shows the size and direction of your miss, because knowing you scored 4.45 is far less useful than knowing you went 53° too warm.
Scores and accounts
There is no sign-in wall. Finishing a run posts your score under an anonymous account, and signing in with Google links that same account, so anything you have already set carries over. Your scores stay in this browser regardless.
Common questions
- Why is color memory so unreliable?
- Your eye is excellent at comparing two colors side by side and poor at storing one in isolation. The moment a color leaves the screen you are working from a rough description of it — warm, mid, fairly strong — rather than the value itself, and every one of those words covers a wide range.
- What counts as a good score?
- On Easy, anything above 30 out of 50 is a sharp eye and above 40 is unusual. Hard and Brutal shrink the study time and steepen the penalty for near misses, so the same accuracy scores lower. Compare yourself against your own average rather than the leaderboard.
- How is the score calculated?
- Each round measures how far your answer sits from the target across hue, saturation and brightness, normalizes that into a single error, then raises it to a falloff exponent that steepens with difficulty. Hue is weighted by the target's saturation, because a near-gray barely has a hue to miss.
- Is this a color blindness test?
- No. Off Colors measures memory, not perception, and a low score says nothing about color vision deficiency. If you want to know whether you see color differently, ask an optometrist for an Ishihara or Farnsworth test — this game cannot tell you.
- Is there a daily puzzle?
- Yes. Everyone gets the same five colors each day, once a day, and the streak counter tracks how many days in a row you have played it. It resets at midnight in your own timezone.
Read more
- The color memory test — how the test works and what the score means.
- Why color memory fails — what your brain stores when it stores a color.
- Hue, saturation, brightness — the three dials explained.
- The twelve hue families — shade ramps and hex codes across the wheel.
- Is this a color blindness test? — no, and here is what to take instead.