The Daily Hue

A daily puzzle that hides one colour inside a real artwork and hands you three sliders to find it. You do not pick from swatches. You build the colour yourself from hue, saturation and lightness, which is a very different thing from recognising it.

1. Look at the painting at the top of the page and decide which colour you think it is asking about.
2. Set the three sliders: Hue from 0 to 359, Saturation and Lightness from 0 to 100. The hex code updates live under them.
3. Hit SUBMIT GUESS. Each channel comes back with a word telling you which way to go and a score out of 100 for the whole guess.

Most colour games ask you to recognise a shade. This one asks you to construct it, which turns out to be much harder and much more interesting, because you have to translate what you see into hue, saturation and lightness before you can even make a guess. The art is not decoration either: the reveal gives the colour a name, explains where the family sits historically, and drops you into a gallery of other works that lean on the same hue, so a bad round still teaches you something. The daily puzzle is free and needs no account. The catch is that the deeper parts, the curated collections and the Explore colour search, sit behind sign-in and a paid Curator tier.

Per channel, not per guess. A wrong hue comes back as WARMER or COOLER, saturation as STRONGER or WEAKER, lightness as LIGHTER or DARKER, each with an arrow you can act on immediately. The colour of the chip tells you distance rather than direction: red for badly off, amber for close, yellow for nearly there, green for exact. The number on the right is a 0 to 100 match score, and 100 is the only score that ends the puzzle.

Daily puzzle

The free game on the front page. One artwork, one hidden colour, five guesses, resets each day.

Collections

Sets you can play outside the daily. Monthly collections hold the past days; Curator collections are themed instead, grouped by painter (Van Gogh, Signac), by medium or by genre, and are opened with silver and gold keys.

Explore

A search over the artwork library by colour, either one colour or two. Sign-in gated.

• Fix the hue before you touch anything else. It is the only slider with a 360-point range, so a hue that is 30 off costs you far more score than a saturation that is 30 off, and WARMER or COOLER is the cheapest clue to act on.
• Do not chase the loudest colour in the painting. The featured colour is often the one holding the picture together rather than the one shouting, and the reveal screen tells you whether it was the dominant, accent or signature colour of the work.
• Middle values are a better opening than extremes. The sliders start at 180/50/50 for a reason: from the middle any direction hint still leaves you room, whereas an opening at saturation 95 wastes the STRONGER half of the answer space.