Swatch Spill

Somebody has tipped the paint swatches onto the floor. Your job is to put them back.

The wall. A pegboard, a row of hooks, and a floor covered in paint cards. Every colour on the wall wants its cards back, and the colours are deliberately close together. Two greens that are the same green, right up until you hold them next to each other.

Hang a card on the wrong hook and it goes back on the floor.

It grows. You start with a handful of colours and a handful of cards. The wall gets wider, the hooks multiply, and the colours crowd closer. An hour in you are making calls you would not have trusted yourself to make at the start.

Scooping. Dragging one card at a time is fine when there are twenty of them. It is not fine when there are two hundred. So you learn to sweep: drag through the pile, gather a handful, and run them onto a hook together. If you would rather keep going one card at a time, there is a setting for that. Nothing gets taken away from you.

Gradient runs. A separate puzzle. A strip of cards, each one shade off the last, to be put in order from lightest to darkest. Up to thirty of them. It is the hardest thing in the game and it is over in two minutes.

Colour vision modes. Four of them: full colour, red and green, blue and yellow, and lightness only. They do not filter the game or label the cards, because a label would just solve the puzzle for you. They rebuild the palette along an axis you can actually see, so the puzzle keeps its shape and you get a fair go at it.

The clock, if you want it. Off unless you turn it on. Time is granted per card, so a bigger shift buys you a longer clock rather than an impossible one.

What it isn’t. There is no story, no character and nothing chasing you. It is a wall, some hooks, and a very large number of colours. That is the whole thing.

This is my first game. If something in it annoys you, say so in the discussions, I’ll try to fix it.