Palette

One target colour a day, the same one worldwide, and three sliders to mix your answer with. You can work in RGB or flip to CMY at any point, since both drive the same colour from opposite directions, one additive like a screen and one subtractive like ink. Then you submit, once. The score comes from Delta-E, the perceptual distance measure borrowed from print and textiles, out of a maximum of ten thousand.

1. Study the target panel on the left against your mix on the right. Your mix starts as a neutral grey, with all three sliders parked at 128.
2. Drag the sliders to mix, switching between RGB and CMY whenever one model feels more natural for the colour in front of you.
3. Watch the hex under your mix, which updates as you drag.
4. Hit Submit. One shot per day, and a new colour lands at midnight UTC.

Almost every colour game asks you to pick a shade. Palette asks you to build one, which is a much harder and much more honest test, because it exposes whether you actually know what is inside a colour or just recognise it when you see it. Grading on Delta-E rather than raw RGB distance is what makes it fair, and the ladder is brutal in the right way: everyone lands in the right family, and the scoreboard is decided in the last handful of units. One shot a day and a free RGB to CMY switch keep it to a couple of minutes, and it will quietly teach you more about colour models than any tutorial.

Scoring is a Delta-E ladder with a title attached to each rung. Under 1 is a perfect ten thousand and the Chromatic Genius label, 1 to 3 keeps you above nine thousand nine hundred, 3 to 6 above nine thousand seven hundred, and past 12 you drop under eight thousand eight hundred and get called colour blind for your trouble. The gap between good and great is tiny, which is the point.

Daily

The one colour a day everybody gets, refreshed at midnight UTC.

Levels

A second tab sitting beside the daily one in the header, flagged with its own marker.

• Name the colour before you touch a slider. Deciding out loud which family it belongs to stops you from wandering the sliders and burning your one attempt on a shade you never meant.
• Use CMY for muted and earthy tones. The game itself points this out, and it is right: thinking in ink is far more intuitive for anything that looks like paint or fabric than pushing three light channels around.
• The last few units are the whole game. A Delta-E of 6 is already two rungs down the ladder, so once you are in the right family the work is comparing edges of the two panels, not hunting the hue.
• Trust the hex readout for the arithmetic, but never for the judgement. Delta-E measures how different the colours look, not how far apart the numbers are.