Dialed
A daily color challenge. Five colors, five rounds, ten points per round, fifty points max. Same colors for every player on the same day — so you can compare your score with anyone. One play per day. Recreate each color from memory using hue, saturation, and brightness sliders; scoring is by Delta E 2000 perceptual difference.
How Dialed works
Dialed is a daily challenge in the Wordle format. Every day at midnight UTC, a new set of five colors is generated deterministically from the current date, and every player worldwide sees the same five colors. You have one play per day. The game saves your result in your browser, so you cannot replay today — but tomorrow's challenge is waiting.
Each round shows you a color for three seconds, then hides it. You recreate the color from memory using hue, saturation, and brightness sliders. When you submit, the target is revealed and your guess is scored by Delta E 2000 — the modern CIE standard for perceptual color difference. Ten points per round: ΔE 0 is 10 points, ΔE 5 is 5 points, ΔE 10 or higher is 0 points.
Why "Dialed"?
"Dialed in" is designer slang for something that is exactly right — a color that is precisely matched, an alignment that is pixel-perfect, a system that has been refined to its ideal state. Dialed is the daily exercise for that: how close can you get to a target color from memory, with three dials and no re-dos? Each day is a fresh attempt to be dialed in.
The shared-daily format
The one-play-per-day constraint is what makes Dialed's score meaningful. Without it, you could replay until you memorized the answers, and the score would just measure how many times you played. With it, the score measures your actual performance on a fixed puzzle that everyone else also tried once. This is the same principle that made Wordle work: the constraint creates comparability, and comparability creates community.
The daily colors are determined by a simple hash of the UTC date string. If you look at the source of this page you will see the function — it is genuinely deterministic, not server-side generated. Two players opening the page on the same UTC date, anywhere in the world, will see the same five colors. No accounts, no server, no database — just a date and a hash function.
Tips for higher scores
- Before the color vanishes, consciously note its warmth and its lightness — these are the two most important dimensions of the guess.
- Note if it looks muted or vivid — highly saturated colors are easier to remember but harder to guess the exact hue.
- Do not rush the sliders. You have unlimited time to guess — the 3-second window was only for memorizing.
- If unsure, err toward the middle — extreme values (very dark, very bright, very muted) are more likely to be wrong than middle-range values.
- Play every day to build the skill — daily games reward consistency, not one big effort.
Frequently asked questions
What is Dialed?
Dialed is a daily color memory game. Five colors, five rounds, 10 points per round, 50 points max. Every day brings a new set of colors, and the colors are the same for every player worldwide — so you can compare your score with friends. Guess by memory using hue, saturation, and brightness sliders; score by Delta E 2000 perceptual difference. One play per day.
How does the daily seed work?
The game uses the current UTC date (format YYYY-MM-DD) as a deterministic seed. That seed drives a simple pseudorandom number generator which picks the five target colors for the day. Because the seed is the same for everyone, everyone gets the same colors. Because the date changes at midnight UTC, a new set of colors is available every day. No server, no database — everything is computed client-side from the date.
When does the daily challenge reset?
At 00:00 UTC (midnight UTC). In most of Europe that is early morning; in the Americas it is late evening; in Asia it is mid-morning. The reset time is chosen because UTC is the universal standard, not because it favors any particular time zone. Your next play is available when the UTC date rolls over.
Why only one play per day?
Because the shared-daily-challenge format only works if everyone plays the same colors once. If you could replay, you could learn the answer and then score higher on your second attempt, which would make scores meaningless to compare. One play per day makes the score comparable. The game saves your result in localStorage; the challenge reopens when UTC date advances.
How is Dialed different from Color Memory Game?
Color Memory Game gives you a random set of colors each play — you can replay as many times as you want, and each play is different. Dialed gives you the same five colors as everyone else on the same day, and you only get one play per day. The scoring is also different: Dialed is 50 points total (10 per round), Color Memory Game is 100 points (20 per round). Dialed is the "daily puzzle" format.
How is scoring calculated?
Each round awards up to 10 points based on Delta E 2000. ΔE 0 gives 10 points, ΔE 5 gives 5 points, and ΔE 10 or higher gives 0 points — linear in between. Five rounds total, so 50 points is a perfect game. Most players score 25–40 on a typical day. The ΔE value is shown per round so you can see exactly how close you got.
Can I share my result without spoilers?
Yes. The share button copies a Wordle-style emoji grid with your score and per-round performance, but no color values. The grid uses 🟩 (ΔE < 2), 🟨 (ΔE < 5), 🟧 (ΔE < 10), and 🟥 (ΔE ≥ 10) so friends can see your performance without seeing the answers. The share text also includes the site URL and the current date.