How to Play True Colors, a Daily Colour Naming Quiz

True Colors shows you a colour and asks what it is called. Five questions, four names each, one right answer. It sounds trivial until the swatch is somewhere between teal and cerulean and you realise you have been using both words interchangeably for years.

There is a Daily mode - one quiz shared by everybody in your timezone for the rest of the calendar day, so comparing scores with a colleague is meaningful - and a Quick Game that generates a fresh set whenever you want another go.

How to play True Colors

1. Enter a display name, or let the game reuse one already saved in this browser.
2. Choose Daily for the shared puzzle of the day, or Quick Game for a fresh random set.
3. Each question shows one colour swatch and four candidate names. Pick the one you think matches.
4. Getting at least half right is a win. The award scales with the score: bronze at 50%, silver at 75% and gold for a perfect five.
5. "Play Again" replays the same mode; "Change Mode" takes you back to the picker. The Daily is the same quiz all day, so replaying it will show you the same questions.

Strategy and tips

• Judge the swatch against the names you can rule out rather than the one you like. Three of the four are usually eliminable on hue alone.
• Learn the boundary pairs, because that is where the questions live: teal versus turquoise, indigo versus violet, maroon versus burgundy, ochre versus mustard.
• Screen calibration matters more than you would like. A very warm night-mode display shifts blues and greens enough to change your answer, so if you take the daily seriously, take it with a neutral screen.
• Names that describe a material - rust, sand, slate, olive - are usually duller and less saturated than the pure hue names next to them. That alone resolves a lot of pairs.
• Play the daily before the quick game. Once you have seen a colour named in a quick set you cannot unsee it, and the daily is the score worth comparing.

What makes True Colors different

Colour quizzes online are mostly the Ishihara plates - a colour vision test - or the "arrange the hues in order" gradient game. This is a naming quiz, testing vocabulary rather than perception, which is a different and much more arguable skill.

Adding a shared daily is what makes it worth returning to. One quiz a day, the same for everyone in your timezone, gives a team something to compare over coffee - the format that made Wordle work, applied to colour.

It is also under a minute long. That is deliberate: a daily has to fit into the gap where you would otherwise refresh a news site.

Frequently asked questions

More to read

• Games like Wordle: daily puzzles worth a bookmark: One puzzle a day, the same for everybody, done in five minutes. Here is what actually kept working after the clones died.
• 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.