How to play picker.ink

Every day there are five target colors. You rebuild each one with three dials and your eyes. Closer match, higher score. Five colors make a set.

The rules

1. Each round shows a target color next to your color.
2. Tune three dials: hue, saturation, and brightness.
3. Each dial gets one motion. Press, drag as long as you like, and the moment you let go it locks. A tap counts as your motion too, so don't rest a thumb on a dial you're not using.
4. On a keyboard, arrow keys move a dial freely. It locks when you press Enter or move focus away.
5. Reveal locks any dials you haven't touched, exactly where they sit. If a dial's starting position already looks right, leaving it alone is a legitimate play.
6. When all three dials are locked, the round scores. Five rounds make your set.

Reading your score

Each color earns 0 to 100. You only get 100 when all three dials land exactly on target. Everything else is scored by how different the two colors look to a human eye, not by how far the dials are from the mark.

That distinction matters. Two misses of the same slider size can score very differently, because some misses are invisible and some are loud. A hue that is 20 degrees off on a gray target barely registers. The same 20 degrees on a vivid target is glaring.

The result screen shows three small dials per color, with the target mark against yours, so you can see which dial cost you. Your set score is the average of the five colors. The colored tiers (green, yellow, orange, red) on the pips and share card are shorthand for how close each one landed.

The three difficulties

• Easy. A coarser grid, with dials that start close to the mark. The dials snap to even values, so an exact hit is genuinely reachable. A good warm-up.
• Hard. The full color space, with dials that start far off (but never on pure black or white). Fine-grained dials, so a bullseye means landing on one value in hundreds.
• Insane. The full color space, with dials that can start on pure black or white, and no color preview on the dials to guide you. Targets skew vivid and punishing. Your only feedback is the swatch itself.

Strategy: judging each dial

Hue first. The hue track always shows the full rainbow, so it answers the easiest question first: what family is this color in? Get the family right before you think about anything else. One warning: the track is drawn vivid and bright, so match the family, not the exact shade you see painted on the track.

Saturation and brightness talk to each other. The saturation track is painted at your current brightness, and the brightness track runs from black up to your current mix. Every dial you move repaints the ones still open. That is why order matters: each dial you lock makes the remaining tracks more truthful. Locking hue first is not just tradition, it makes the other two tracks show you real answers.

Use the whole motion. The dial locks when you release, not when you start. Scrub past the target on purpose, watch your swatch overshoot, then walk it back. One long careful motion beats three timid ones you don't get to make.

Muted targets forgive hue, vivid ones don't. On a grayish target, being off in hue is nearly invisible, so spend your care on saturation and brightness. On a saturated target it is the reverse: hue is everything.

Dark targets hide everything. As brightness falls, all colors converge on black. If the target is dark, brightness is the dial doing most of the work, and small hue or saturation misses cost almost nothing.

Insane asks a different question. With neutral tracks, the swatch is your only instrument. If your dials start on pure black, moving hue or saturation changes nothing you can see. So judge brightness with your eyes first, commit it, then steer hue and saturation by watching the swatch come alive. It is the one mode where you plan the order of your three motions before touching anything.

Daily, practice, calendar, and shared links

The daily is one set per date. Everyone playing the same day on the same difficulty gets the same five colors, and a new set arrives at midnight your local time. Finish it and the screen counts down to the next one.

Practice is unlimited. Random sets, never saved, no day number. It is where you go to try a dial trick without spending your daily.

The calendar lets you play any daily you missed, back to the first day. A missed day is scored and saved, but playing it late will not repair a broken streak. Days you have already finished open as a locked result, not a fresh board.

Shared links carry the whole result inside the link itself: the five targets and your five colors. Nothing is uploaded anywhere. Anyone who opens your link sees your exact card, and can start their own game from it.

Streaks and sharing

Your streak counts consecutive days of finishing the daily on the actual day. Miss a day and your next finished daily starts a new streak at 1. Sharing copies a short summary: the day number, difficulty, your average, five colored blocks, and the link to your exact card.

Play today's five colors, or read the FAQ.