Shade Shift: Color Puzzle

Can you find the tile that’s different? Find it before the clock runs out. Then do it again, on a bigger board, with the shades a little closer together, and a little less time on the clock. That is the whole game. It is much harder than it sounds. HOW IT PLAYS • Tap the tile whose shade differs from the rest. • Answer fast — the quicker you are, the more the round is worth. • Get several right in a row and a streak multiplier builds. • A wrong tap costs you a second and a half. Three wrong taps in one round costs a life. Guessing does not work. • The board grows from 3x3 to 6x6, the difference between the shades narrows towards the limit of what the eye can resolve, and the clock tightens from nine seconds down to three. Two power-ups, once each per run. A hint clears half the wrong tiles. Extra time adds five seconds to the round you are on. THE DAILY CHALLENGE One challenge a day, and everyone in the world gets exactly the same boards in exactly the same order. One attempt. No second tries, no extra lives, no hints bought with an ad — so a daily score actually means something when you compare it with someone else's. Share your result in a tap. The shared summary shows how far you got and how fast you answered, and gives nothing away about the puzzles themselves, so posting it spoils nothing for anyone who has not played yet. Play every day and a streak builds. TUNED TO YOUR SCREEN, NOT AN AVERAGE ONE Here is the problem with a game like this: the same pair of colours does not look the same on every phone. An OLED at full brightness, an older LCD at twenty per cent, a night-mode filter, a sunny bus window — those are four different games. So Shade Shift measures it. A twenty-second calibration shows you shades that get progressively closer and asks you to point at the odd one until you cannot tell any more. Wherever you stop becomes the hardest the game will ever get for you. It is not a test of your eyes; it is the game adjusting to the screen in your hand. BUILT TO BE PLAYABLE Roughly one man in twelve has some degree of reduced colour vision, and a game made of colour differences leaves them out by default. "Light and dark only" fixes that properly. Turn it on and every difference in the game becomes a difference in lightness — never hue, never saturation — which is discriminable whatever your colour vision. The calibration works alongside it. WHAT IS NOT IN IT • No account, no sign-in, no email address. • No banner ads, no ads between screens, nothing that interrupts a round. There is one optional video you can choose to watch for an extra life or another hint, and that is the only advertisement in the app. • No timers that make you wait, no lives to refill, no purchases at all. • No server. The daily challenge is worked out on your own device from the date, which is why it needs no connection to play. A colour puzzle, a daily challenge, and a speed test for your eyes — free, offline, and it fits in the gap between two bus stops.