Flag Fill

Flag Fill shows you a national flag with one of its colours cut out, replaced by the grey checkerboard that graphics software uses for transparency, and asks you to paint it back in. The country is named right under the flag, so this is not a geography quiz; it is a test of whether you actually know what shade of blue or red or green that flag uses, as opposed to the generic version of it your memory has been storing. Every other colour in the flag is still there and still correct, which is both the fairest possible clue and a quietly cruel one, because a stripe next to yours makes every degree of error visible.

1. Look at which section of the flag has gone transparent and read the country name below it.
2. Set your colour. The picker gives you a saturation and brightness pad, a hue slider, a hex field you can type into directly, and eight blunt preset swatches for when you just want pure red or pure blue.
3. Press Submit guess. There is no second try, so nudge the hue before you commit.

There is a particular kind of confidence that only survives until someone asks you to be precise, and Flag Fill exists to remove it. You know the flag. You have seen it a thousand times. Then the missing stripe sits there as a checkerboard and you discover that your mental copy stores the word blue and nothing more. What makes it more than a gotcha is the reveal: putting the two hex codes next to each other turns a vague sense of being close into a specific, memorable fact, and after a week you genuinely start carrying real values around in your head. It is quick, it costs nothing, it shows no ads, and the archive is open and score-free, which makes it one of the easier daily games to fall into for twenty minutes when you meant to spend one.

The reveal is honest to two decimal places of self-inflicted damage. Your swatch and the real one appear side by side with both hex codes spelled out, so a guess of #1616d9 against an answer of #0038a8 shows you exactly how a colour you would happily have called correct is in fact several shades off. Above them sits a score out of 100 with one decimal, and under that a one-line verdict pulled from a fixed ladder: Better luck tomorrow at the bottom, then Not quite, Not bad, Good guess, Great guess, Incredible work above 95, and Perfect score reserved for an exact 100. A share button, your streak and the countdown to the next flag fill out the card.

Daily flag

One flag a day, numbered. Feeds the streak counter that sits in the footer.

Archive

A monthly calendar of every past puzzle, with the score you got written into each day you have played. The panel says outright that archive games do not touch your stats or streak, so you can dig through old flags without any pressure.

• Type the hex instead of dragging. If you have any memory of a flag's specification, and a lot of flags publish one, the text field is the only control precise enough to use it.
• Use the intact stripes as a reference, not the whole flag. A country that pairs its blue with a specific white or gold usually chose them to contrast at a particular strength, so matching the tone of the neighbouring band is a decent proxy for matching the missing one.
• Resist the preset swatches. They are pure primaries, and almost no national flag actually uses one; the eight dots are there for speed, not accuracy, and they will cap your score somewhere in the eighties.
• Judge saturation before hue. Most misses on this game are not the wrong colour, they are the right colour turned up too loud, and the pad's vertical axis is where that gets fixed.
• Warm up in the archive. It keeps no score against you, and a dozen old flags will teach you the specific navies and crimsons that keep coming back.