About

color.toys is a small library of color puzzles. No accounts, no ads on the puzzles, nothing to install.

Seeds

Every board here is generated from a seed: a short code that is the entire puzzle. Give the same seed to the generator and you get the same colors, the same grid, the same solution, every time, on any device.

In free play the seed lives in the address bar as ?s=. Copy the URL and whoever opens it plays the board you played. Hit new for a fresh one.

The daily uses the date itself as the seed, so everybody who plays on the same day plays the same board. It rolls over at your local midnight.

Scores

Best scores, daily results and streaks are kept in your browser’s local storage and never leave the device. Clearing your site data clears them.

Where the colors come from

Switch Swatch paints out of a pigment box: sixty-five real artists’ pigments (Alizarin Crimson, Viridian, Raw Sienna, Payne’s Grey) approximated in sRGB. A harmony scheme decides the shape of each palette, which hues at which values, and then every slot snaps to an actual pigment. Each board lists what it was painted with under the palette.

The silhouettes are catalogue specimens: twenty families in rotation, from moths and beetles to shells, ferns and arrowheads, all generated from the seed like everything else here.

Color

Mixing here is a flat average in RGB, the way light mixes on a screen rather than the way pigment mixes in a tin. Scoring compares your color to the target in CIELAB, so “close” means close to the eye rather than close in hex.