Dialed Game Tests Your Color Memory

Originally published at: Dialed Game Tests Your Color Memory - TidBITS

The designers at Lightspark write:

Humans can’t reliably recall colors. This is a simple game to see how good (or bad) you are at it.

Dialed shows you a color for 5 seconds, then asks you to recreate it using three color sliders. Recreate the exact color to get 10 points; if you’re merely close, the game awards a lower score. A round consists of five colors, so a perfect score would be 50 points. Although I’m not a particularly visual person—I have aphantasia and can’t mentally “see” images in my head—I scored over 42 points in several tries at the easy level. I consistently overestimated saturation, dialing in more vivid hues than the target color actually had. At the hard level, you only get 3 seconds, and the countdown tries to confuse you by showing unrelated colors. A multiplayer version gives you a link that shows the same five colors to everyone and compares your scores.

Dialed color game

Yeah, it’s harder than it seems.

Fun game!

I forgot to screenshot my score of 37.xxx, not so great. I nailed 3/5 and klunkered the other two.

Not too bad for a guy with red-green color-blindness. (Ask me how much loathe the Ishihara test :upside_down_face:)

1 Like

As another with aphantasia I’m intrigued—thank you Adam!!

1 Like

38 or so, although I didn’t understand what I was supposed to do for the first one, then wasn’t paying attention for another, so who knows. The hardest problem for me wasn’t remembering the colors but finding them.

Also, are the insults necessary?

Another in the 38-ish group. Yeah, the comments were a bit snarky, but I found them funny more than insulting. AFAIK I do not have aphantasia, but I didn’t find my self trying to remember the color by forming a mental image of it. Instead, I said to myself “that’s a dark forest green,” and then tried to recreate that color for the answer.

1 Like

I kind of did a combination. For example, one was a brickish red, so I remembered “brick red”, found a color that looked brick red, then tried to tweak it to be a bit more like the color I actually saw.

Yes, I definitely used verbal descriptions to help me.

I’ve always considered myself good with colours, but am I ever bad at this. Humbling.

43 pretty consistently. Wish I could have done this when I was younger–I used to have perfect color recall.

2 Likes