Hue Match Game

About Hue Match

Hue Match is a color memory game with a twist. Instead of picking the right swatch from a lineup, you must build the color yourself. A color appears on screen for a few seconds, with a bar counting down. Then it disappears and a different color takes its place. Your job is to slide the hue until your color matches the one you remember.

At first only the hue is in play: you drag one rainbow slider and everything else stays fixed. From level 6 onward the lightness changes as well, so you have to remember whether the color was pale, dark or somewhere in between. When you lock in, the game shows your color and the target side by side, which is the most educational moment of the round.

How to play

1. Study the color while the countdown runs. Name it to yourself, for example 'a slightly greenish teal', because a verbal label helps memory.
2. When it disappears, drag the rainbow slider to match the hue. From level 6 on there is a second slider for lightness.
3. Check your color on the screen and make fine adjustments. You have between 14 and 18 seconds.
4. Press Lock in. Your color and the target appear next to each other along with the angular distance on the color wheel.

A colour appears for a few seconds. When it disappears, slide the hue (and later the lightness) until your colour matches the one you saw.

How scoring works

The score combines two errors. The hue error is measured as an angle on the 360-degree color wheel, and it counts fully when you are within a tolerance that shrinks from 62 degrees on level 1 to 22 degrees on level 10. Hue is circular, so 350 degrees and 10 degrees are only 20 degrees apart.

On the levels where lightness is part of the task, the lightness error also matters: it can reduce your score by up to 65 percent when you are far off, while a close match keeps the full hue score. The memorize time falls from 3.6 seconds on level 1 to 1.6 seconds on level 10, and the relaxed timer setting lengthens it.

What it trains

Hue Match trains short-term color memory and color matching, two things designers, painters, decorators and printers use all the time. Remembering a color and describing it well is more difficult than recognizing it, which is why this game asks you to reproduce it.

It is also an honest look at your own color perception. Most people are best at recalling hues that have names, like orange or purple, and weakest in the in-between areas such as blue-green, where categories overlap.

Tips for a higher score

• Give the color a name and a modifier. 'Warm yellow-green' is easier to hold in memory than a raw impression, and it narrows the slider range right away.
• Locate the color relative to the primary points of the wheel: red at the left end, yellow, green, cyan, blue and magenta evenly spaced. Remember how far it was between two of them.
• Look at the swatch for the whole time. Do not look away to prepare; every second of exposure counts, and the first second matters most.
• Make your adjustment in two passes: a fast one to get close, then a slow one with the plus and minus nudges of the slider.
• If you are not sure, favor the middle of the range you believe. Hue errors in the correct neighborhood are cheaper than errors on the opposite side of the wheel.

The idea behind it

Color memory tends to drift toward prototypical colors. Studies of memory for colors show that people shift remembered colors toward the nearest named category, which means a slightly yellowish green is remembered as a more typical green. Your errors in this game may show the same pull.

The hue circle used here is the HSL model, a simple geometric rearrangement of the RGB values your screen uses. It is not perceptually uniform: a 30-degree step in yellow looks different from a 30-degree step in blue, which is why a tolerance in degrees is only an approximation of how different two colors look.

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Free, no account. Your best scores are saved on your device.