How to play Hue & Hide

Most hide-and-seek games are about finding somewhere to stand. This one is about what colour you are when you get there. Paint mixes rather than replaces, so each dab pulls you part-way towards a pot and matching a surface takes two or three deliberate choices — you cannot simply pick the right answer from a list.

Three things give you away, and all three only count while you are inside a seeker's light: a colour that does not match the surface behind you, moving, and paint that is still wet. That is the whole game. Painting and moving are both safe when nobody is looking and both fatal when someone is, so every round becomes a question of timing rather than reflexes.

Colour matching is judged in CIE L*a*b*, the same perceptual space used for print proofing, rather than by comparing raw RGB values. It matters more than it sounds: plain RGB rates two similar greens as further apart than a light and dark grey that anyone can tell apart instantly, which would make the game feel arbitrary. Here, if it looks like a match to you, it scores as one.

Every room is generated and then checked before you see it — at least three hiding places must be reachable with the paints you were given, and at least two of them must need genuinely different colours, so there is always an answer and always a reason to move. Rounds add seekers, widen their cones and tighten what counts as a match, and there is a daily room seeded from the date so everyone plays the same one.