The duo behind the internet’s best daily color-guessing game
Meet Hannah and Ekim, the minds (and eyes) behind the nerdiest graphic design game around.
Hannah Larsen and Ekim Karabey navigate the world in two very different ways. Karabey’s intuition skews toward math and Larsen’s skews creative. Both, however, studied computer science and work in the software world. And that means both are fluent in the language of digital colors known as hexadecimal code, or “hex code.”
Digital screens display color by mixing precise intensities of red, green, and blue light. Hex codes typically have one two-digit value for each red, green, and blue. Those two digits span from 0 to 255 — or 00 to FF. (In a hexadecimal number system, the numbers 0 through 16 are written as digits: 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A,B,C,D,E,F.) #FF0000 codes for red, #00FF00 for green, and #0000FF for blue. And mixing all the lights (#FFFFFF) or none of the lights (#000000) in RGB gives white and black, respectively.
“When you write code, you’ve gotta know what hex codes are,” Karabey said. The two have long played daily games like Wordle together, and decided to make their own game. When Larsen suggested a color-guessing game, the idea (and name) immediately felt perfect: Hexcodle.
Here’s how it works: A target color appears on the screen. You must guess its six-digit hex code. If (or when) that first guess fails, you adjust your guess by tweaking the amount of red, green, and blue light intensities. You get five guesses total, and each failed guess comes with a hint — arrows that suggest nudging your guessed digits a little or a lot.
Hexcodle is absurdly fun if you’re into colors (and guessing) like I am. The game is straightforward, satisfying, and it inspired a recent essay I wrote for Sequencer about color vision deficiency. The game has lured in thousands of daily users since launching in August 2023.
Max G. Levy
I spoke with Karabey and Larsen for that essay, and enjoyed learning more about Hexcodle. The following is a lightly condensed version of our conversation.
So first thing’s first. Do you both have stellar color vision?
Hannah Larsen: I have regular eyesight deficiency, like really terrible, but my color vision is perfect.
Ekim Karabey: I have normal color vision, but I'm definitely not very talented at the visual arts. If you were to tell me to pick a [particular] green and paint it on a canvas, I'll probably get it way off.
Our intuition of how colors work doesn't necessarily map to hex codes. You can look at a color and think it has a little bit of blue in it — and in a hex code, it might have a lot of blue. The classic example is full red and full green (FF, FF, 00), which makes pure yellow with hex codes. But in real life, if you look at yellow, you're not thinking to yourself, there's a lot of green and a lot of red in there.
What strategy do you each use to solve the puzzle? How can I get better at Hexcodle?
EK: For the second digit I just use the arrows. For the first digit, I try to come up with two or three colors that I know in my head for sure, and then mash them together, and that ends up getting close. If it's a bluish green, it's probably a mix of, like pure green plus maybe, like cyan. Or if it's like a yellowish red: yellow is full red, full green; and if it's a little more red than normal yellow, it means the green has decreased a little bit.
How many of these reference points do you have? Do you memorize more obscure colors like burnt sienna?
EK: The easy gimmes are blue, red and green. I wouldn't know burnt sienna but brown, I do know. Magenta is a good one to memorize. Yellow is a good one to memorize: turquoise, brown, black and white. And then, yeah, you just build off of them. If it's pure blue with a little bit of black. Maybe you add blue, and then tone it down a little bit.
HL: That’s really interesting. He has a very big math brain, and I have a very big art brain. So it's very interesting that you're like, “Oh, I find the calculations of how much cyan is this.” My strategy for doing it is just purely off vibes. If it's like a light orange, I know the light is going to be higher intensity, so it's going to be a higher rather than lower values. And then I'm like, What is orange made up of? It's made out of yellow, and red and green is the closest to yellow in my head. And 99% of the time I get really close on the first guess.
My strategy for doing it is just purely off vibes.
How has the game changed since last year?
EK: We got a lot of people on Reddit when we first launched, saying, “Make it a little harder." and "Make it a little easier.”
HL: What I really enjoy doing the most is using my creativity in a lot of different ways to enhance the website. On the “Win” screen, you'll see a little parrot guy that pops up — I made that myself! There's a happy one and there's a sad one. I also do audio engineering. So I made the sound that you hear at the end of the game.
I love that sound.
HL: Thank you! We took a lot of inspiration from the daily crossword — the mini crossword — they have that little piano riff at the end. As a music person, I'm like, oh my god, I love that so much; we have to have something for Hexcodle. It had to be upbeat and short and sweet.
EK: Most of the fun of the game has just been the community and growing the website and seeing people's TikToks.
HL: We’ve taken into account user feedback. We have this feedback form. I try to send out emails on a weekly basis just making sure that the users are having a good time and rolling out updates. If 10 people are saying, “We want to see this feature,” I'm like, “Okay, we'll think about it.”
And you host contests for your community members to win your merch.
HL: Yeah we'll have contests from time to time. One we did previously is a Google Form to submit your favorite hex code and a color name that's appropriate. We sat down and just scrolled down the entire list to pick the one we like the most. “Food court honey mustard” goes insanely hard.
As daily players yourselves, do you perform better or worse than average?
EK: I don't know actually — we don't really track it! I'm not super into collecting people's data like that, even harmless data.
So who is better between the two of you?
HL: I think we're both pretty good.
EK: I think me, for sure. [laughs]
HL: It's a common misconception that we must be so good at the game because we coded it. The reality is it's a somewhat random algorithm that picks it for us so we actually don't know what the hex code is gonna be each day. We like to do it ourselves and try to figure it out. We're just as clueless as everyone else.