I Thought Matching Colors Would Be Relaxing, But I Was Wrong

Think fast!

You might think that you’ve got the memory of a vengeful elephant, but according to science, your ability to recall colors isn’t so hot. Research has claimed that humans are terrible at remembering certain shades of color, and that’s where this new timesink of a game is aiming to improve things. The goal is simple: Look at the Pantone swatch shown on your screen, try to match it as closely as possible, and see how well you do over a run. It’s a concept that can easily gobble up hours of your time as you work to out the exact shade of green or red that you were briefly exposed to.

Play Dialed

By the way, my top score is 48.4 out of 50. Top that, if you can (and without cheating, please).

Created by the father-son duo of Geoff and Sam Teehan, Dialed launched back in February, and the vibe-coded game quickly racked up millions of plays. The tools are easy to use, as you’re given sliders for color, saturation, and brightness, with your final result determining your best score out of 10 based on how close you get to matching the original color. A player will have to match five colors in total, and each challenge is accompanied by some text that either mocks you gently for being way off the mark or serves you up a sardonic congratulations on your color-matching skills.

“I think we just figured out a simple formula that works,” Geoff Teehan said to Fast Company in May. “You’re going to perceive a stimulus, then you’re going to re-create it from memory using simple inputs or controls. “We’re stripping out everything else that’s unnecessary. There are no instructions, there are no sign-ups or logins. There’s no onboarding. There’s no app to download. You just click a link, and you’re playing.”

If this sounds like your idea of a good time, you can also check out What’s My JND, a color perception game. Another easy-to-play game in your desktop browser, the goal of this one is to see how good you are at noticing the differences between colors and clicking on the border between them. For example, you can easily see the line separating teal from orange, but as you progress, the hues and colors become increasingly more difficult to separate.