What Chroma Quest actually is
Chroma Quest is a free Android game built around one mechanic: you are shown a colour, and you have to match it. Not pick it from a lineup — match it, by adjusting until what you produce sits on top of what you were given. The game then scores your attempt on precision.
That single change makes it a very different experience from the tile-sorting puzzles that dominate the category. Spotting which of nine squares is slightly different is a search task. Reproducing a colour is a judgement task, and it is the one that professionals actually need.
The four modes
Quest Mode — 12 rounds of precision
The core progression. Twelve rounds, each with a target colour, each scored on how close your match lands. The difficulty comes from the fact that near-misses feel correct. A hue that is eight degrees off looks right in isolation and obviously wrong side by side — which is precisely the discrimination the mode trains.
Camera Mode — pull colours out of the real world
Point your camera at anything and the app extracts the colour, then challenges you to reproduce it. This is the mode that separates Chroma Quest from browser-based colour tests, which can only ever hand you values generated by code.
It also happens to be genuinely useful outside the game. Photograph a wall, a fabric, a product label, and you get its colour as a workable value — a habit designers already have with dedicated tools, available here as a side effect of play.
Multiplayer Sync — QR code head-to-head
One device generates a QR code, the other scans it, and both start the identical challenge at the same moment. No accounts, no server matchmaking, no waiting in a lobby. Two people in the same room with the same target and the same clock.
It is a deliberately old-fashioned approach to multiplayer, and it works because the constraint — being physically together — is the point rather than a limitation.
Hall of Fame — your precision over time
Scores and precision history are kept locally, so you can see whether you are improving. Worth watching over weeks rather than sessions: colour discrimination improves slowly and unevenly, and a single bad run usually says more about your screen brightness than your eye.
Who this is for
Three groups get quite different things out of it, and we have written a page for two of them:
- Designers, marketers and artists who work with colour daily and want a low-effort way to keep their judgement sharp — see the colour test for designers.
- Parents and teachers introducing children to colour names and differences — see colour games for kids.
- Everyone else, for whom it is a two-minute puzzle that does not require an account, a tutorial or a subscription.
An honest note on colour vision
Chroma Quest is a game. It is not a colour blindness test and should not be used as one. Colour vision deficiency is diagnosed with standardised instruments — Ishihara plates, the Farnsworth-Munsell 100 Hue test — under controlled lighting, by someone qualified to interpret the result.
A phone screen has its own colour profile, its own brightness curve and whatever ambient light happens to be in the room. Scoring badly in a game under those conditions tells you nothing clinical. If you have a real concern about your colour vision, see an optometrist.
Free, with ads
The app is free to download and contains ads, plus optional in-app purchases. It is rated for all ages by ClassInd. Nothing you photograph in Camera Mode is uploaded — the colour is extracted on the device.