How to Play The Daily Hue

The goal

Each day, The Daily Hue highlights one real artwork — a painting, sculpture, ceramic, or another medium from a museum or public collection. One color is hidden somewhere in that piece. Your job is to match it using three sliders: hue (the color itself), saturation (how vivid or muted it is), and lightness (how light or dark it is).

You have up to five guesses. Match the hidden color exactly and you win immediately. Use all five guesses and the answer is revealed — either way, you unlock today's color gallery of related artworks.

The three sliders

Hue moves around the color wheel — red toward orange, yellow, green, blue, and back. Saturation pushes a color from grayish and muted toward vivid and intense. Lightness lifts a color toward white or pulls it toward black.

Together, HSL describes most colors you see in art. The Daily Hue hides one specific combination drawn from the featured artwork. Move each slider, submit a guess, and compare your swatch to the artwork.

Reading the arrows

After each wrong guess, small arrows appear on the sliders. They point toward where the answer still could be — warmer or cooler on hue, more or less saturated, lighter or darker. Think of them as clues narrowing the search space, similar to how a word puzzle tells you which letters are in the right place.

A strong second guess often adjusts all three sliders at once rather than locking one slider and hoping the others align. If hue feels close but the swatch looks washed out, try saturation before chasing a big hue jump.

Using the artwork

The hidden color always comes from the featured artwork — not from the background of the page or a random palette. Look for dominant areas: a sky, a garment, a glaze, shadow in foliage, or a single bold accent.

Some days the answer sits in a small detail; other days it fills half the canvas. Tap or click the artwork to zoom when you need a closer look. Museum attribution appears with each piece so you know where the work comes from.

Winning, sharing, and streaks

When you match the color, The Daily Hue celebrates your win and opens the color gallery — other artworks that share a similar hue. You can share your result grid with friends without spoiling the exact color.

Create a free account to save streaks across days and devices, post scores to the leaderboard, and bookmark favorites from the gallery. Guests can still play every day without signing in.

Collections and past days

Beyond today's puzzle, browse Collections for themed sets of artworks — each piece is its own color challenge. Monthly collections group past daily puzzles by calendar month.

Signed-in players can replay past days from the archive. Each daily puzzle also has a read-only editorial page with artwork notes and a link back to play.