How to play Tint (and why it scores the ratio, not the amount)
Tint is a free colour-mixing game you play in the browser. A ring of colour sits around a beaker, and you hold three taps to mix red, green and blue until what is in the beaker matches the ring.
The catch is the one that makes it a game: nothing pours back out. There is no undo and no drain. The only way to change the mix is to add more of something, and the beaker only holds so much.
No download, no account, no app. It runs on a phone on a bad connection, and it keeps working with the network switched off.
The rules, in two sentences
Hold a tap to pour that colour, and lock it in when the mix matches the ring. You get five rounds, every pour spends room you cannot get back, and filling the beaker ends the round wherever it stands.
Why it judges the ratio, not the amount
This is the part that surprises people, so it is worth being precise about.
Tint does not compare how much red you poured against how much red the target has. It compares the ratio between your three channels against the target’s ratio. Both are scaled so their largest channel is at maximum, and then measured against each other.
That single decision is what keeps the game playable. Consider the alternative: if the game compared raw amounts, then pouring too much red would be unrecoverable, because there is no way to take red out. You would be stuck staring at a broken beaker with no legal move.
Because it is a ratio, an over-pour is always fixable.
A worked example
Say the target is a warm orange — roughly 255 red, 150 green, 60 blue.
You go in heavy and pour red until you have 200 units of it, and nothing else. Your mix is 200:0:0, which normalises to 255:0:0. That is pure red, and you are a long way off.
Now add green. At 200 red and 118 green your ratio is 255:150:0 — the red and green are already correct relative to each other. Add blue until you reach about 47 units, and your ratio is 255:150:60. That is an exact match, even though you poured 365 units total to describe a colour the target describes in far less.
Nothing was undone. You corrected purely by adding, which is always possible.
The beaker’s capacity is the real score
So if every mistake is fixable, where is the difficulty?
In the room it costs. That 365-unit correction above is the whole point: the same colour could have been mixed in far fewer units by pouring carefully the first time. On the steady beaker you have 300 units in total, so the heavy-handed version of that round does not fit at all.
When the beaker fills, the round ends where it is. You still score — a full beaker is worth 40% of whatever your ratio earned, not zero — but you have lost most of the round’s value and you no longer have any way to improve it.
This is why the game has no timer. Graze is about reflexes and deadband is about momentum; the pressure here is spatial. You can take as long as you like. What you cannot do is take it back.
Watch the room bar under the beaker. It shades amber under 40% and red under 20%, and the pour sound itself gets heavier as the room runs out, so you can hear the squeeze without looking away from the mix.
The three levels
Difficulty moves three dials at once — how fast the taps run, how close counts as close, and how much the beaker holds.
- Coarse — roomy beaker. Fast taps and plenty of room to correct a mistake. The right place to learn what a ratio feels like.
- Steady — normal flow. The default, and the level the scoring is built around. Correcting a heavy pour costs real room.
- Fine — barely enough. Slow taps and a tight beaker. One heavy pour can sink the round outright.
The beaker is the same size on screen at every level. Only what it holds changes, which is the point: the constraint is invisible until you hit it.
Scoring
Each round scores up to 200 points based on how close your ratio landed, falling off sharply as the miss grows. Five rounds make a run, and 550 across the run is a respectable total.
If you overflowed, the round’s score is multiplied by 0.4. That is deliberately a penalty rather than a wipe — an earlier version scored a full beaker as zero, which made the last part of a bad round pointless to play.
Frequently asked
Can I undo a pour? No. There is no undo, no drain, and no way to reduce a channel. This is the central rule of the game rather than a missing feature. The fix for pouring too much of something is to add the other two colours until the ratio is right again, which costs room — and that cost is what you are actually playing against.
Why does pouring more of everything not change my colour? Because the game scores the ratio between your channels, not the amounts. Adding the same proportion of all three keeps the ratio identical, so the colour in the beaker stays where it is while your room disappears. If the mix looks right and the number is not moving, you are pouring evenly and wasting space.
What does the number in the middle mean? It is how far your current ratio sits from the target’s, so lower is better and zero is exact. It turns amber when you are within tolerance and green when you are very close. It is the same number the game scores you on, so there is nothing hidden behind it.
Which level should I start on? Steady. It is the default and the level the scoring is tuned around. Drop to coarse if you want room to experiment with what adding each colour does, and move to fine once you are landing close on most rounds, since it punishes a heavy first pour hard.
Is there a daily? Yes. Daily mode gives every player in the world the same five colours, generated from the UTC date, so a score is comparable to anyone else’s that day. The strip of swatches on the result screen is the shareable artifact.
Where Tint sits
Tint is the portfolio’s game about the cost of correction. Its sibling deadband is about not overcorrecting in the first place; graze is about how close you dare let a shot pass; filter is about asking better questions; overload is about spending a limited hand; and closure is about which move you are forced to make next.
Every one of them is free, runs in a browser, and works offline.