Paint Chips

Paint Chips is a free daily color guessing game: we give you the name of a colour, you show us what it looks like. What colour is mauve? Is teal more green or more blue? What on earth is puce? Each colour gets a few seconds on a big colour picker, then the real one is printed right beside yours like a pair of chips at the hardware store, with a single number for how far apart they are. It runs in your browser with no download, a whole day takes about a minute, and it is one of our favourite quick games.

Every day brings the same five colour names for everyone, and they climb from easy to infamous. The first is always a gimme that nearly everyone agrees on (fire-engine red, lemon yellow, sky blue), the second an everyday name with a little room for argument (navy, coral, mint green), the third a name everyone knows and nobody quite agrees on (teal, magenta, mustard), the fourth a designer's name (mauve, periwinkle, cerulean) and the fifth one of the famous troublemakers: puce, chartreuse, fuchsia, ecru or taupe. There are 134 names in all, and the same name never comes back within two weeks.

To mix a colour you pick its hue and lightness on the colour field, then slide the saturation to make it greyer. That slider is the real skill: most colour names are far more muted than the bright rainbow you start on. When you press MIX IT, the reveal splits your chip into yours and the real one, stamps a verdict from PERFECT MATCH to WRONG AISLE, and shows everyone's picks for today as a cloud of dots on the field, each in its own colour. You find out whether your teal was bluer than most people's, whether the crowd can agree on mauve at all, and how close everyone's average colour came, which is often eerily close.

The score is fair and exact. The distance between your colour and the real one is measured with CIEDE2000 (ΔE), the colour difference the paint and print trades use: under 2 is hard to tell apart at a glance, around 10 is clearly a different shade, 40 is a different colour. Each colour is worth up to 1,000 points, so a perfect day is 5,000, and ranked runs are replayed on our servers, which puts Paint Chips among our competitive games. The real colours come from two public lists: the CSS named colours that every web browser knows, and the xkcd colour survey, where hundreds of thousands of people named colours. The end card is a strip of your five chips against the real ones, made for a screenshot or the share button.

Paint Chips plays the same on a phone or a computer. On a phone, tap or drag on the colour field (a loupe above your finger shows the colour), drag the slider and tap MIX IT; with a mouse, click and drag the same way; on a keyboard, the arrow keys move your pick, Q and E make it greyer or more colourful and Enter mixes. Everyone picks from exactly the same colours, but every screen shows them a little differently, so a warm or dim display can nudge your picks. It is one of our mobile games and PC games, and it belongs with our brain games, casual games and casual games for adults.