Prism — the daily color gauntlet
How sharp is your color eye? Prism is a free browser color perception game: five quick rounds, the same for everyone each day, each one a different way of seeing color — hue, order, mixing, memory and lightness. No signup — a full daily takes about a minute.
The five rounds
| HUE | A target color, and a color wheel. Drag around the wheel until your swatch matches the target's hue exactly, then lock it in — scored by how many degrees you're off. |
| ORDER | Six shades that once formed a smooth gradient, shuffled. Tap two tiles to swap them; rebuild the flow — every neighboring pair that belongs together earns points. A perfectly reversed gradient counts too: it's the flow that matters, not the direction. |
| MIX | Two pots of paint and a target that's some blend of them. Set the mixing ratio on a slider — blind: there's no preview. Lock in to reveal what you actually mixed. Pure color intuition. |
| FLASH | A color fills the screen for a moment, then vanishes. Recreate it from memory on a hue-lightness pad. Color memory is famously slippery — this round finds out how much of it you keep. |
| LEVEL | Two patches, two different hues. Drag the right patch lighter or darker until the two are exactly equally light. Harder than it sounds — some hues lie about their lightness. |
Scoring
Every round scores your color eye from 0 to 100 — full marks for a spot-on match, partial credit for close. Your daily result is the average of the five rounds, plus a five-square trail (🟩 spot on · 🟨 tinted · 🟥 off-palette) you can copy and send as a challenge — the link carries your score, so a friend who opens it is dared to out-shade you. Come back tomorrow for a fresh gauntlet and build a daily streak — beat yesterday's score to sharpen it, and if you miss a day your personal best is saved and waiting. The menu shows your last seven days as a chain of squares — each finished gauntlet fills one, and today's pulses until you play. After you finish, the results screen shows today's rivals — how many players ran the gauntlet in the last 24 hours, the best score among them, and where yours ranks. Rivals are always anonymous: a count and a score, never names or accounts.
Controls
| Adjust | Drag (mouse or finger) — around the wheel, along the slider, across the pad, up and down the patch. In ORDER, tap two tiles to swap them. Desktop: arrow keys fine-tune. |
| Answer | The LOCK IN button commits your answer — no timer, take your time. ENTER locks too. |
| Start a round | Each round waits for you — the FLASH color won't flash until you're ready. |
Modes
Daily gauntlet: 5 seeded rounds — hues, gradients, blend ratios and lightness targets identical for every player worldwide that day. One attempt each. Mid-gauntlet progress is saved if you get interrupted.
Practice — the color trainer: endless rounds, your way. Pick all five mixed or drill a single skill — hue, order, mix, flash or level. Every drill climbs a 12-level difficulty ladder: score green and the next round gets harder — subtler gradients, more tiles, briefer flashes, tighter tolerances — score red and it steps back down. Your current and best level per skill live in the picker: how high can you climb? Prism also keeps a lifetime color average per skill (from both daily and practice rounds, stored only in your browser), so the picker doubles as your color profile: it shows your average and level for each skill and flags your weakest round from today's gauntlet. Every round you finish — daily or practice — also earns color XP equal to its score: climb a 12-rank ladder from fresh eye through hue whisperer and prism mind up to the calibrated eye. Your rank only ever goes up, and it lives in your browser — no account needed.
Tips
- Hue: get in the neighborhood fast, then slow way down — the last few degrees are the whole game.
- Order: squint. Blur makes the odd tile jump out of the flow.
- Mix: ask "how much of the far pot is in there?" — most people underestimate the darker paint.
- Flash: name the color to yourself the instant you see it ("dusty teal, fairly dark") — words hold what the eye drops.
- Level: yellows and cyans look lighter than they are; blues look darker. Trust the comparison, not the hue.
Prism is a game, not a vision test — every round mixes hue and lightness signals, so you can score well whatever your color vision. It measures practice and judgement, not your retina.
FAQ
Is it free? Do I need an account? Free, no account, no install needed. It runs in any modern browser, on phones and school Chromebooks alike. If you'd like the daily one tap away, you can optionally add Prism to your home screen — after you finish a daily, an "add to home screen" button appears on supported browsers. No download, no store, it's the same game in an app-shaped wrapper.
Is it the same puzzle for everyone? Yes — the daily gauntlet is seeded by the date, so your 73 and your friend's 88 came from identical hues and gradients.
Does it work in my language? Practically yes — the rounds are colors and swatches, not words.
Who made this? Prism is an original game by Yuki Andersen. More free games: Gauge, Glimpse, Tempo, Wordpull, Floe, Ballast, Well Duel, Well Putt, Wellspring.
