Colour Clash
LiveA colour name painted in the wrong colour. Tap the colour it is painted in for thirty seconds while your reading habit tries to answer for you. A wrong tap costs two seconds.
Solo run
Answer the ink, not the word.
Thirty seconds. A colour name appears painted in a different colour — tap the colour it is painted in. Your brain will try to read it. Do not let it.
No personal best saved yet — this run can set one.
How to play
- 1
A word in the wrong colour
A colour name appears, painted in a colour it does not say. That mismatch is the whole game.
- 2
Answer the ink
Tap the colour the word is painted in — never the colour it spells. Four answers, always in the same order.
- 3
Mistakes cost time
A correct answer scores one point. A wrong one scores nothing and takes two seconds off the clock.
- 4
Thirty seconds
When time runs out your score is the number of correct answers. Best in this browser is kept for next time.
Tap a colour button, click it, or press 1 to 4 on a keyboard. The four answers never change position, so you can learn them by place.
What is the Stroop effect?
Reading is automatic. Show a fluent reader the word RED and they have read it before they can decide not to — so when that word is painted in blue, two answers arrive at once and only one of them is allowed. The delay that causes is the Stroop effect, first described in the 1930s and still one of the most reliable findings in psychology.
A game is a crude version of the lab test, but the interference is the same: the congruent questions feel effortless and the mismatched ones feel like a small physical tug. Your score is really a measure of how well you can overrule a habit.
What counts as a good score?
Most people land between fifteen and twenty-five correct answers in thirty seconds. The ceiling is set by how quickly you can stop reading, which is not something you can force — it improves for a few runs and then flattens out.
32+ correctUnstoppable
Almost no interference at all. Rare air.
25–31Sharp
You are reading the ink, not the word.
18–24Solid
A good clean run with the odd stumble.
11–17Getting there
The word still wins now and then.
Under 11Warming up
Normal at first — this one fights back.
Tips that actually work
- Blur your focus slightly and take the colour from the whole shape, not the letters.
- Learn where the four answers sit and answer by position, not by reading them.
- Slow down for the first three: a wrong answer costs two seconds and a point.
Play it with a group
In Tournament mode each player takes one thirty-second run on the same device, with a handover screen in between. Standings rank correct answers, and a tie goes to whoever made fewer wrong taps. It is a good one to play out loud — the arguments start fast.
Colour vision varies. The four answers are labelled in words as well as colour, so the game stays playable, but the interference this game is built on is weaker for some players.
Fun, not diagnostic: this is a browser game, not a clinical measure of attention or executive function.