The daily color game — how good is your eye?
Each day Shade gives you five target colors. For each one, move the Hue, Saturation and Lightness sliders until the “Yours” swatch matches the “Target” swatch, then Lock in. You can’t see the numbers behind the target — you’re matching by eye.
Your guess is scored by perceptual color distance (ΔE in the CIELAB color space), which is much closer to how the human eye judges “how different are these two colors” than comparing raw red/green/blue values. Smaller distance = higher score.
| Result | What it means | Roughly |
|---|---|---|
| 🟩 | Spot on | almost indistinguishable |
| 🟨 | Close | same color, slightly off |
| 🟧 | In the area | right family, wrong tone |
| ⬛ | Missed | a different color |
Say the target is a muted teal. Start with hue: slide until the base colour reads teal rather than green or blue — somewhere near 175°. Then set lightness: this one is a mid tone, so keep it around the middle rather than pale or deep. Finally saturation: a muted teal means pulling saturation down until the swatch loses its neon edge and settles into a calmer, greyer green-blue. Lock in when "Yours" sits on top of "Target". The order matters — a hue error is obvious at a glance, a saturation error is the one that quietly costs you points.
Two colours can have very different RGB values yet look almost identical, and vice-versa, because human vision isn't linear in RGB. Shade scores you in CIELAB, a colour space designed so that the straight-line distance between two colours (called ΔE) tracks how different they actually look to a person. A ΔE near 0 means the two colours are essentially indistinguishable; a ΔE around 2–3 is a difference only a careful eye catches; larger gaps are plainly visible. Scoring this way rewards genuinely good colour judgement instead of lucky number-matching.
Shade is deliberately one small set of five colours a day — the same five for everyone — then you're done. That turns it into a quick daily ritual rather than an endless feed. Solving keeps your streak alive, and the spoiler-free emoji grid lets you compare with friends without revealing the colours. It's free, needs no account, and every guess is scored on your own device.
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Do I need to be good at colour theory? | No. You're matching by eye. A feel for hue, lightness and saturation develops naturally as you play. |
| Is everyone's puzzle the same? | Yes — the same five colours each day worldwide, so shared scores are meaningful. |
| What is ΔE exactly? | A perceptual colour-distance in the CIELAB space; smaller means the two colours look more alike to a human eye. |
| Does it work on a phone? | Yes, it's mobile-first — drag the sliders with your thumb. |
| Do I need an account? | No signup, no login, no server. Your streak lives only in this browser. |
Shade is one puzzle a day. Come back tomorrow for a new set and keep your streak alive. More about the game on the how-to-play and color-matching game pages.