How to Play Paint Mix: Which Pigments Made This Colour?

Paint Mix shows you a colour and asks which pigments went into it. There are five to choose from - cyan, magenta, yellow, black and white - and every target is mixed from some non-empty subset of them. Pick the subset. Eight rounds, then a medal.

It works because the answer is deducible rather than guessable. A colour that is clearly a blue-green has cyan in it and does not have yellow; if it is pale, white is involved; if it is muted rather than pale, that is black. Two or three rounds in, most people stop guessing and start reasoning, which is the moment the game becomes good.

There is a solo mode with a shared daily set, and a live multiplayer room where up to eight players race the same target on a twenty-second timer.

How to play Paint Mix

1. Pick solo or multiplayer. Solo asks for a display name, then offers Daily - the same eight colours for everyone in your timezone all day - or Quick Play for a fresh random eight.
2. Each round shows one target colour swatch. Toggle on the pigments you believe were mixed to make it, then submit.
3. In solo, you find out immediately. A wrong answer also shows you the colour your chosen pigments would actually have made, side by side with the target, held on screen for four seconds.
4. A progress row tracks ticks and crosses across the whole run.
5. Score out of eight earns a medal: gold for a perfect run, silver for six or seven, bronze for four or five. The result screen shows all eight targets with a cross over each miss.
6. In multiplayer the host runs the room and does not play. Every player races the same target against a fixed twenty second timer. Correct answers are withheld until the end so nobody can copy, and the final leaderboard ranks by score with average submission order as the speed tiebreak.

Strategy and tips

• Read the hue first. Cyan plus yellow gives green; cyan plus magenta gives blue; magenta plus yellow gives red and orange. Getting the hue right usually fixes two of the five toggles immediately.
• Then read the lightness. A pale, chalky, pastel version of a hue almost always means white is in the mix.
• Then read the saturation. Muted, greyed, muddy colours mean black. The difference between "pale" and "dull" is the difference between white and black, and it is the single most common mistake.
• A pure, vivid single hue is often exactly one pigment. Do not over-add - every extra toggle is a chance to be wrong, and the answer set really can be a single pigment.
• Near-neutral greys and browns are the hard ones. Work out which hue is faintly showing through, then add black, then check whether it is also lightened.
• In multiplayer you get no feedback until the end, so trust the reasoning rather than second-guessing. Twenty seconds is plenty for one deduction and not enough for three revisions.

What makes Paint Mix different

Colour games online generally ask you to match a colour by dragging sliders, or to spot the odd swatch out. Paint Mix asks a question with a discrete, checkable answer - which pigments - which means it can be scored, shared as a daily and raced, none of which works with a slider.

The wrong-answer feedback is the part that teaches. Being shown the colour your own selection would have produced, next to the one you were aiming at, is far more informative than being told you were wrong, and it is why people get noticeably better within a single run.

It is also the only game here that runs the same puzzle both as a solo daily and as a live race, so the same content works for a quiet morning and for a team call.

Frequently asked questions

More to read

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• Free daily puzzle games to play in your browser: A shortlist by puzzle type - word, logic, colour, memory - of dailies that take five minutes and are the same for everyone.
• Free browser games to play with your team, no signup: Games that start in one click, work on a call, and never ask anybody to make an account.