Chroma Scoring

The concept

Chroma measures the accuracy of your color perception on a scale from 0 to 1000. The closer you reproduce the target color, the higher your Chroma. Your final score is the average of your 5 rounds.

Color distance

Every color is defined by three channels: Red, Green, Blue (0-255 each). The accuracy of your pick is measured by the Euclidean distance between the target color and your selection in RGB space:

This distance is then normalized between 0 (completely wrong) and 1 (perfect):

The exponential curve

A linear score wouldn't be interesting: going from 80% to 90% accuracy would be just as easy as going from 10% to 20%. Chroma uses an exponential curve (exponent 2.3) that compresses average scores and stretches high scores:

In practice: being "roughly right" earns little. Being very precise earns a lot. The last points are the hardest — and the most rewarding.

The golden curve (Chroma) vs. the linear line. At 70% raw accuracy, the Chroma only reaches ~450.

Score tiers

Player distribution naturally follows these categories:

Reaching a Chroma of 880+ requires an average precision of less than ~15 RGB units per channel on every round. That's exceptional perception.

Why not a linear score?

A linear score would concentrate 90% of players between 500 and 800, making the leaderboard hard to read. The exponential curve spreads the distribution: average players are clearly distinguished from good ones, and experts from elites. Every bit of progress is meaningful.

Game modes

The scoring is identical regardless of mode. In Normal mode, you have 5 seconds to memorize each color. In Expert mode, only 2 seconds. Leaderboards are separate.

Daily Shades always use Normal mode (5s) to ensure fairness among all players.