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A torii on a rock in still water, under a cherry branch in blossom, with mist over the hills behind it.

See colour. Understand it. Master it.

Train your eye for colour.

IRO is a game about learning to see colour more precisely.

A colour appears. Estimate its hue, saturation and lightness, submit your answer, and see how close you were.

App Store Coming soon Google Play Coming soon

iOS and Android · One-time purchase

Red maple leaves on a bare branch, against a dark ground.

Moments

Some days, something small appears in the garden. Nothing tells you it is there.

A bonsai pine holding to a rock above a pale shore.

No fail state

No lives. No energy. No countdown. Retry a round whenever you want.

A single stone set in raked sand, the rings drawn around it.

Your reading

See how accurately you read each part of a colour, and where your guesses tend to drift.

A koi turning through reeds in shallow water.

Name a colour

Think you can read a colour in one? Call the round before your first guess. Get it right, and you earn the right to name that colour.

How you play

Four simple steps

The colour stays in front of you the whole time. You get three guesses at it, and the round keeps the best one rather than the last.

  1. See

    A colour appears and stays visible.

  2. Estimate

    Choose its hue, saturation and lightness.

  3. Commit

    Submit your numbers without seeing a preview of the colour they make.

  4. Learn

    The game tells you which way each number has to move. The exact target comes at the end.

0 – 100

The closer,
the higher
the score

The scoring

How a guess is scored

Your guess and the target are both converted to OKLab, a colour space built so that equal distances in it look like equal differences to the eye. The score is how far apart the two land, from 0 to 100.

A 40° hue error on a near-grey is almost invisible. The same 40° on a fully saturated colour is obvious to anyone. Plain HSL arithmetic scores those two the same; OKLab scores them the way you see them.

Hue is measured around the circle, so guessing 350 against a target of 10 is 20 off, not 340.

The journey

Three books. Twenty-seven chapters.

Twelve rounds in each. The early chapters focus on specific parts of the colour spectrum. Later chapters ask you to read a much wider range of colours and pay closer attention to saturation and lightness.

Each chapter teaches your eye something slightly different.

Every chapter runs the same rules. The targets never get greyer just to make things harder.

  1. Book I

    Form

    Find the colour family.

    1. Dawn

    2. Ember

    3. Pollen

    4. Bamboo

    5. Forest

    6. River

    7. Ocean

    8. Iris

    9. Dusk

  2. Book II

    Change

    Look between familiar colours.

    1. Persimmon

    2. Maple

    3. New Leaf

    4. Moss

    5. Rain

    6. Tide

    7. Evening Water

    8. Wisteria

    9. Plum

  3. Book III

    Stillness

    Notice the quieter differences.

    1. Cedar

    2. Stone

    3. Ash

    4. Paper

    5. Snow

    6. Ink

    7. Lacquer

    8. Shadow / Light

    9. Spectrum

The daily ritual

One colour a day.

Every day, everyone gets the same colour to read. Complete it and that day's stone appears in your weekly garden. Seven days make a week.

Playing banks rest days. Miss one and it spends a rest instead of ending your streak. Nothing to buy, nothing to equip.

A week laid out in a raked sand garden: four stones set in the sand for the days already read, a brush ring for today, and two empty hollows for the days still to come, under a pine on a rock and a red sun.
  1. Mon, read
  2. Tue, read
  3. Wed, read
  4. Thu, read
  5. Fri, today
  6. Sat, to come
  7. Sun, to come

The daily challenge

Eight koans.
One a day.

A koan moves exactly one rule of the round and leaves the rest alone. Nothing about it is scored. Each has a case of its own, set in its own world, and a painting made for it.

One Breath

Gives you a single guess.

Memory

Shows the colour for three seconds, then takes it away.

Two Truths

Gives you one of the three numbers exactly and locks it. You read the other two.

Silence

Says nothing between guesses. The full reading shows once, at the end.

Echo

Leaves the colour up for one read, then hides it until the end.

Precision

Judges one of the three numbers more strictly. The same one for everyone.

Blind Mix

Hides the colour your numbers make until the end.

Other Hand

Moves the round to the dial, whatever your instrument is set to.

One a day. The same koan for everyone. One play at it.

27 artifacts.

One for every chapter you master.

Earn three stars on all twelve rounds in a chapter and you complete its artifact: that chapter’s twelve colours as a disc, with a brush-drawn mark at its centre.

Book III · Spectrum

The Ensō

One stroke, and everything the circle holds.

The last chapter is the whole circle, seen again. Its twelve colours make the disc; this mark stands at the centre of it.

Twenty-seven in all

More ways to read colour

  • Choose between sliders and the dial.
  • Your best guess is the round's score, not your last one.
  • End a round early once you have earned a star.
  • Retry any round. The colour is redrawn every time.
  • Set your sealed colours together on plates and name them.
  • Explore the colour atlas.
  • Practice the areas you find hardest.
  • Sit for 5, 10 or 20 minutes, or a length of your own.
  • Listen to thirty-two original music tracks.
  • Choose between light and dark themes.
  • Use high-contrast mode when you need it.

Just the game

Questions

What will IRO cost?
IRO will be a one-time purchase. There will be no subscription, ads or in-app purchases. The price has not been set yet.
Can I play it in a browser?
IRO is being made for iOS and Android.
When does it come out?
There is no release date yet. IRO is planned for both iOS and Android.
Do I need an internet connection?
No. Once installed, IRO works offline.
What does IRO collect?
Nothing. There is no account, sign-in, sync or tracking. Your progress stays on your device. This website is a separate matter, and the privacy page covers it.
I am colour blind. Can I play it?
Partly, and it's worth knowing which part. Nothing in the interface is said with colour alone: every state also carries a glyph, a star count or a word, and there's a high-contrast mode. The game itself is colour discrimination, though, so there's no display filter that would change what it asks of you.
Is there a daily puzzle?
Yes. Everyone gets the same colour each day, along with the same daily Koan.

Coming to iOS and Android

See colour. Understand it. Master it.

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