Hexcodle

About Hexcodle

Hexcodle is a daily colour puzzle made by Hannah Larsen and Ekim Karabey, who credit themselves on the site as Hannah and Ekim. It started in August 2023 and has been picked up by design blogs as a Wordle for colour geeks. The site also runs Hexcodle Mini, an archive of past days, custom games you can send to friends, and a newer game from the same pair called Inboxed.

A hex code splits a colour into three pairs, RRGGBB, for red, green and blue. Each character runs from 0 to 9 and then A to F, so 00 means none of that channel and FF means all of it. Hexcodle shows the target colour in a box and you type a full six-character code using the on-screen keypad. Your guess appears beside the target so you can compare the two by eye.

The feedback is per character. A tick means that digit is exact. A single arrow means the right value is one or two steps away in the direction shown, and a double arrow means it is three or more steps away. When the round ends you see the answer and the name of the colour. Settings offer Easy, Hard and Expert difficulty, which give less feedback, and an RGB mode that shows each pair as a number from 0 to 255 instead.

It rewards a little knowledge of how screens mix light, but the arrows teach you as you go, so beginners can still finish most days.

How to play Hexcodle

1. Look at the target colour and estimate how much red, green and blue it holds.
2. Type a six-character hex code with the keypad (0 to 9 and A to F) and press Enter.
3. Read the feedback under each character: a tick is exact, a single arrow means one or two steps away, a double arrow means three or more.
4. Adjust each character in the direction of its arrow and guess again, comparing your colour with the target.
5. Find the exact code within five guesses to solve the day; the colour's name is revealed at the end.

Tips

• Start with the first character of each pair; it decides most of how strong that channel is, while the second only fine-tunes it.
• A middle guess such as 888888 tells you straight away which channels are above or below half.
• Greys have three equal pairs, so if the target looks neutral, keep the pairs close to each other.
• Yellow is red plus green, cyan is green plus blue and magenta is red plus blue; use that to guess which channel is low.
• Switch to RGB mode in Settings if numbers from 0 to 255 are easier for you to reason about.

Questions