Color Memory
A color appears for a few seconds, then vanishes. Your turn: adjust the hue, saturation, and brightness sliders to rebuild it. Five rounds, one question — how much did your eyes really remember?
Score saved! Enter your name:
Three Sliders, One Color
Set hue, saturation, and brightness separately; the color appears where all three meet.
One Quick Look
The color stays for only a few seconds. Higher difficulty gives you less time to look.
Perceptual Scoring
Your accuracy is measured in CIELAB, which reflects differences your eyes actually see.
How to play
- Each round fills the screen with one color. It stays visible for 3 to 7 seconds, depending on difficulty.
- When it vanishes, three sliders appear on the left: hue, saturation, and brightness.
- Drag the sliders until the area on the right matches the color you remember, then press the target button.
- Your accuracy is shown as a percentage and the two colors are compared. Your five-round total is your score.
What Is the Color Memory Game?
Color Memory is a perception and memory game in which you try to recreate a colour you saw on screen for only a few seconds. Each round a single colour fills the screen, disappears moments later, and three sliders appear: hue, saturation and brightness. You never see the colour again; you work only with what stayed in your head. After five rounds, what you saw and what you chose are placed side by side and the difference is shown as a percentage.
The game starts from a simple fact: humans are excellent at recognising colours and surprisingly poor at remembering them. Put two colours next to each other and you can tell apart the tiniest difference, but ask someone to recall the same colour from memory and what comes back differs from what went in. Research shows this drift is not random — memory pulls a colour towards the "typical" example of the category it belongs to: a bluish tone drifts towards pure blue, an orangeish one towards typical orange. Over five rounds you will start noticing your own drift.
Accuracy is calculated in the CIELAB colour space rather than from the RGB values on screen, so that the score matches what your eye actually sees. In RGB, a numerical difference of the same size can be nearly invisible in the green region and glaringly obvious in the blue one. CIELAB was designed precisely to fix that, aiming for equal numerical distances to correspond to equal perceptual differences. That is why the percentage you get represents genuine visual closeness.
How to Play
- Pick a difficulty before you start. The only difference is how long you get to look: Easy 7 seconds, Medium 5 seconds, Hard 3 seconds. Hard also introduces paler and darker tones.
- Each round opens with a three-second countdown. The colour appears full screen and the counter at the top right shows the remaining time to a hundredth of a second.
- When the colour disappears, the three sliders on the left take over. The top slider sets the hue (the full colour wheel from red to purple), the middle one saturation (from grey to vivid), the bottom one brightness (from near-white to black).
- Grab and drag a slider and it widens, with the channel you are turning named at the bottom left. Keyboard works too: tab to a slider, fine-tune with the arrow keys, move fast with PageUp and PageDown.
- The wide area on the right shows your chosen colour live. When you are happy, close the round with the target button at the bottom right.
- The result screen puts your colour on top and the real colour below, with the hue, saturation and brightness values of both. The percentages from your five rounds are added up and saved as your score on that difficulty's leaderboard. The maximum is 500.
What Actually Improves Your Score
- Do not stop at naming the colour. Saying "green" helps you remember there was a green, but makes you forget which green. The word drags the memory trace towards the middle of the category, and that is the single most common source of lost points here. Add a comparison next to the name: "green but close to olive", "blue but washed out".
- Read the three channels separately. While looking at the colour, run through three questions in order: which family is the hue in, how vivid is it, how light is it. The sliders already ask those three questions; looking at the colour in the same language makes the transfer easier.
- Set brightness first. How light or dark a colour is gets remembered more reliably than its hue, and a wrong brightness creates the largest perceptual gap. Lock brightness in first, then hunt for the hue, then fine-tune with saturation.
- Watch your tendency to overdo saturation. Most players remember pale colours as more vivid than they were. If your chosen colour looks "nicer" than the one you saw, you have probably pushed saturation up; step it back a little.
- Choose the moment you look away. After the colour vanishes an afterimage lingers, and it drifts towards the complement of the real colour. Rather than diving straight into the sliders, half a second on a neutral grey background keeps the trace in your head cleaner.
- Keep your screen and lighting constant. The same colour looks different on a screen with auto-brightness or in a room with sun coming in. If you want to compare your scores, play under the same conditions.
- Do not jump to Hard too early. Three seconds is barely enough to read three channels in order and note each one separately; before the habit settles, that time creates more panic than focus. Moving to Hard before you consistently hit above 70% on Medium usually produces a lower score.
Which Skills Does It Train?
- Visual working memory: holding a stimulus that cannot be put into words for a few seconds is one of the hardest jobs working memory faces. Colour is exactly the kind of stimulus where naming does not help, so it exercises that memory directly.
- Detailed observation: the game pushes you from "that is blue" to "that is a washed-out blue leaning slightly green". That habit of distinction pays off directly in design, photography and painting.
- Intuition for colour models: learning by doing that hue, saturation and brightness are separate channels makes life easier for anyone who works with colour pickers. Saturation usually explains why a colour looks "muddy".
- Calibration through feedback: every round you see the gap between your guess and reality. Noticing and correcting a systematic error — always picking more vivid, always picking lighter — is a skill used in any work involving measurement and estimation.
- Undivided attention: the viewing window is short and happens once. Giving all your attention to a single stimulus in a brief window trains attentional control.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the Color Memory game free?
Yes. The game is completely free and needs no membership or registration. It runs straight in your browser, on a computer or a phone.
How is the score calculated?
The difference between your colour and the real one is measured in the CIELAB colour space and converted to an accuracy percentage from 0 to 100. The percentages from your five rounds are added together; the maximum score is 500.
Why CIELAB instead of RGB?
In RGB, equal numerical differences do not correspond to equal perceptual differences; the same gap can be nearly invisible in green and obvious in blue. CIELAB was designed to fix that, so the score matches what your eye sees.
What do the difficulty levels change?
Mainly the viewing time: Easy 7 seconds, Medium 5 seconds, Hard 3 seconds. Hard also brings in paler and darker colours. Each level keeps its own leaderboard.
Why are humans so bad at remembering colours?
Recognising a colour and recalling one are different jobs. Comparing two colours side by side is easy, but recalling from memory drifts towards the typical example of the colour category. That is why the colour you remember usually comes out "purer" than the one you saw.
What counts as a good score?
Above 70% accuracy per round — a total around 350 — is a good result for such a brief look. Rounds above 90% mean the two colours can only be told apart when placed side by side.
Does my screen affect my score?
Yes. Screens with auto-brightness, night-mode filters and the light around you all change the perceived colour. If you plan to compare scores, always play under the same conditions.
Can I play if I am colour blind?
Because the game rests entirely on colour discrimination, accuracy will be lower for players with colour vision differences. The brightness channel still works reliably so the game remains playable, but comparing your scores with the general table will not be meaningful.
Do You Trust Your Eye?
Five rounds, no sign-up needed. Try one round on Medium first and see how you do.
For other games that work attention and perception, try the Stroop Test and the Schulte Table, or browse all our brain games.