Chroma Map Lock

Chroma Map Lock turns any photo into a puzzle built from your own memory.

Upload a picture from your gallery. The game immediately strips every colour out of it, reducing it to a greyscale edge map — a sketch made of boundaries and shapes. Sky meeting horizon. Face meeting background. Shadow falling across a wall. The structure of your photo, intact. The colour, gone.

Below the sketch, eight colour swatches appear. These are not random colours. They are extracted from your photo by a clustering algorithm that analyses every pixel and finds the eight most representative colour groups. The dominant palette of your image, distilled to eight squares, displayed in shuffled order.

The task: place each swatch back into the correct region of the sketch. Select a swatch and tap anywhere on the greyscale image. If the region you tapped belongs to that colour, the entire region simultaneously reveals its original pixels in full colour — that area of your photo lights up exactly as it was. If you are wrong, the tapped region flashes red for a moment, showing you its full shape and extent. That flash is information: you now know what region that colour belongs to, even if you do not yet know which swatch it matches.

The game ends when all eight colours are correctly placed and your photo has been rebuilt from its skeleton. The final image matches the original exactly, because every pixel was always still there — just hidden under the greyscale until you found where each colour belonged.

The difficulty is entirely personal. A landscape with clear sky, ground, and water is straightforward — the clusters divide neatly along the shapes you can see in the sketch. A portrait against a complex background is harder — the algorithm might find three similar skin tones as separate swatches, and distinguishing them requires remembering which parts of the face catch the light. A market scene or a forest is harder still — many colours of similar brightness, indistinguishable in greyscale, each needing to be placed by reasoning about what object occupies that shape.

Your memory of your own photo is the advantage the game gives you. You know what colour the jacket was. You know what the sky looked like that afternoon. You know which wall was painted white and which was painted cream. The player who remembers their photo well will score better than the player who does not. The puzzle rewards attention.

A daily curated image is available for players who want a common puzzle: a painting, a photograph, a natural landscape. The daily puzzle is the same for every player, and scores are shared.

Your photo never leaves your device. All processing happens locally.