Color Memory

How this works

Perception varies by display and lighting, and this is a memory game rather than a test of it. The four tiles differ in lightness as well as hue, so it can be played without telling two hues apart — and the tiles can be announced aloud.

A round shows three flashes to start with, and one more each time you clear one. The sequences are generated in the browser from a seed — each round's is salted by its own number and attempt, so the same run can be rebuilt exactly and nothing about it is fetched or guessed. Played again, the board is a different four colours.

Length is what eventually ends a run; speed is flavour. A tile stays lit for about half a second at first and shortens as the rounds go on, down to 200 milliseconds, and the dark beat between two flashes never goes below 120 — fast enough to feel like a game, slow enough that every flash is unmistakably seen, and long enough that two flashes of the same tile read as two. Past that point only the sequence keeps growing.

A correct round is worth 50 points, plus 10 for every step of length beyond the first three, plus up to 100 more for echoing the sequence quickly, and each consecutive round multiplies that by another tenth up to 1.5×. A round is cleared only if every tap is right: there is no partial credit, because a sequence half-remembered is not a sequence. Lose a life and the same length comes back as a different sequence, so a run's difficulty is never dialled back — you get a second look, not an easier question.

The four tiles are drawn from measured values rather than picked by eye: any board this game can deal has tiles at least ΔE OK 0.177 apart, with a measured OKLCH lightness step of at least 0.158 between them, and each at least 0.124 from the grey field they sit on. That is the same colour engine the rest of PaletteViva runs on — the one behind the contrast checker and the color converter . If you would rather hunt for a difference than remember one, there is the Color Challenge .

Nothing here is uploaded and there is no account. Your best score is one whole number kept in this browser, with no timestamp, no identifier and no history beside it, and it is one of four records this product writes to your device — the others are the working palette, your light or dark choice, and the color reflex game 's best. Clearing this site's data removes all four.

Why one more flash is harder

A sequence of flashes lives in working memory, which is short-lived and small: hold a handful of things without rehearsing them and the earliest are already going. Each extra flash is therefore not one more thing to see but one more thing to carry while the next one arrives — which is why a round stops being about the board at about the point you stop being able to say the sequence to yourself.

Two details make it harder than the count suggests. The first is interference: the sequence before the one being shown wanted the same four tiles and the same part of memory, and early mistakes in a round usually belong to the round before it. The second is that nothing on this board is a landmark — the four colours never move, only their order changes, so there is no position to hang a memory on the way there would be on a larger grid.

The beat between two flashes never drops below 120 milliseconds, even when the flash itself has shortened to 200. That is deliberate: two flashes of the same tile are the one thing a player cannot recover from misreading, so speed gives way to length. What ends a run is how long the sequence gets, and it always gets longer.