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About Colourdle

See a colour. Guess its name. Score by how close your guess is to the actual name, and how close the colour you named is to the target.

Game Options

Two independent choices shape your game:

Timing:

• Daily — 5 colours, same puzzle for everyone each day. Results are saved and can be shared.
• Freeplay — Endless rounds. Play at your own pace. Hit "Finish" when you're done to see your summary.

Game type:

• Classic — One guess per colour. See it, name it, move on.
• Explore — Up to 10 guesses per colour with live feedback after each attempt. See what colour your name matched and how it scored. Your best score per round is kept. Great for learning colour names.

These combine freely: Daily Classic, Daily Explore, Freeplay Classic, Freeplay Explore. Each Daily combination has its own puzzle and saved results.

Palette Filter

Choose a colour source to play with:

• All colours — the full pool of ~3,300 colours
• Crayola — 226 classic crayon colours
• Pantone — ~2,250 professional colour standards
• XKCD — ~700 crowdsourced colour names
• RAL — 120 European industrial colour standards

When a palette is selected, both the target colours and your guess matching are restricted to that source. Each palette has its own daily puzzle.

Scoring

Each round produces two scores:

• Name score (0-100) — How close your typed guess is to the target colour's name. Uses Levenshtein distance (edit distance) normalized to a 0-100 scale. Exact spelling = 100.
• Colour score (0-100) — How close the colour you named is to the target colour, measured perceptually. Uses CIELAB Delta E (CIE76), a standard for perceptual colour difference, mapped through a sigmoid curve.

The two scores are combined using a power mean (p=3), which favours the higher of the two values. This means doing very well on one axis partially compensates for the other.

The maximum base score per round is 100. If your guess matches the exact colour entry (same hex value), your round total is doubled as a bonus — so scores above 100 per round are possible but not expected.

How Matching Works

When you type a guess, the game finds the closest colour name in the active pool using fuzzy string matching. So "scarltt" still matches "Scarlet", and "dark blue" might match "Dark Blue Green". The matched colour is then compared to the target for the colour score.

This means there are two strategies: guess the exact name (high name score), or guess a colour that's perceptually close (high colour score). The best guesses do both.

Technical Notes

• Daily puzzles use a seeded PRNG (Mulberry32) so everyone gets the same colours each day
• Classic and Explore dailies use different seeds so they present different colours
• Colour distance uses the CIELAB colour space with D65 reference white, which approximates human colour perception better than RGB or HSB distance
• Text contrast (black or white) switches automatically based on WCAG relative luminance of the background colour
• All game state is stored in your browser's localStorage — nothing is sent to a server
• The entire game is static HTML/CSS/JS with no dependencies

Credits

Created by Drew Brereton. Source code on GitHub.

Colour data sourced from Crayola, Pantone (via community datasets), XKCD colour survey, and RAL colour standards.