is this a color blindness test?

No. Off Colors measures how well you remember a color, not how well you see one. Those are different faculties, and a bad score here is not evidence of anything medical. If you landed on this page looking for a real screening test, the short answer is at the bottom — see an optometrist and ask for Ishihara.

Memory and perception are not the same thing

Color vision deficiency is a difference in the cone cells of the retina. Someone with a red-green deficiency struggles to distinguish two colors placed side by side, in good light, with unlimited time.

Off Colors removes the comparison entirely. It shows one color, takes it away, and asks you to rebuild it from nothing. That is a working-memory task. People with completely typical color vision perform badly at it — that is the point of the game, and why the average score sits well under half marks.

So the two tests fail in opposite directions. A person with a color vision deficiency might score respectably here, because consistent perception is enough for consistent recall. A person with perfect color vision routinely scores badly, because remembering is the hard part.

Why this game cannot screen for it

• Your screen is not calibrated. Real screening controls illumination and surface. A phone at 40% brightness in a warm room does not.
• The colors are random. Diagnostic plates are engineered to sit exactly on confusion lines. Random hues are not.
• One channel is weighted. Hue is scored proportionally to the target’s saturation, which is right for a memory game and wrong for diagnosis.

What an actual test looks like

• Ishihara plates — the familiar dotted circles with a number hidden inside. Fast, widely used, and good at catching red-green deficiency.
• Farnsworth-Munsell 100 hue — arranging colored caps in order. Slower, and measures how finely you discriminate rather than simply whether you do.
• Anomaloscope — the clinical standard, matching a split field by adjusting a mixture. This is what an ophthalmologist uses when the answer has to be exact.

All three need controlled lighting and a calibrated display or physical set. Take them from an optometrist or ophthalmologist, not from a website — including this one.

So what is this game for?

Finding out that your color memory is far worse than your confidence in it. That is genuinely surprising to most people, and it is measurable in about a minute.

This page is general information, not medical advice. If you have concerns about your vision, speak to a qualified professional.