Flag Tone — Guess National Flag Colors
You've seen these flags your whole life. Then you try to dial one in on an HSB slider and discover Japan's sun isn't pure red, France's blue is almost navy, and Argentina's sky blue is far paler than you remembered. Flag Tone is a free 5-round color memory game built around the world's most recognizable national flags — one band per round, your memory against the real hue.
The flag lineup
Flag Tone features thirty of the world's most recognizable flags, balanced across every inhabited continent. Each card is rendered from an open-source, public-domain flag (the flag-icons set), and the target color is sampled pixel-precisely from the image itself — so the color you're matching is exactly the color we score against, with no drift.
Why flag colors trick you
National flag colors live in two places at once: in your visual memory (polished by years of exposure into a clean prototype) and in the official specification (which is usually deeper and more specific than the version in your head). Most players are far too confident before they actually try the sliders.
Common misses:
- Japan's sun — almost everyone guesses pure
#FF0000. The real disc is a deep crimson (#BC002D): darker, with the green pulled out. - France's blue — guessed as a bright royal blue. Since 2020 the official flag uses a dark navy (
#000091), much deeper than people expect. - USA's canton — the same trap: "Old Glory Blue" is a navy (
#192F5D), not the bright blue most people reach for. - Argentina's sky blue — guessed far too saturated. The celeste band (
#74ACDF) is pale and soft, almost pastel. - Australia's field — guessed as a mid blue. It's a very dark navy (
#00008B). - South Korea's taegeuk — the red half is a crimson (
#CD2E3A), not pure red; players overshoot the brightness. - India's saffron — guessed as plain orange or yellow. It's a specific saffron (
#FF9933), warmer than orange but lighter than people think. - Egypt's top band — many forget which band is colored at all. The top is red (
#CE1126); the black sits at the bottom.
How it works
- You see a card of a national flag with one band marked as the target.
- You adjust three sliders — Hue, Saturation, Brightness — to recreate that band's color from memory.
- You submit; the game reveals the exact target hex and scores your guess from 0 to 10 based on color distance.
- Five rounds total. Average is your final score. There's a hint button if you're truly stuck (costs one point).
About the color accuracy
Every Flag Tone card is rendered from the open-source flag-icons library (public domain) and the target hex is sampled directly from that rendering — the exact RGB shown on the card is the value we score against, with no photographic drift, JPEG noise, or print-vs-screen mismatch. Because flag-icons tracks each country's official flag specification, the targets line up with the real thing: France's navy is the 2020-official #000091, not a generic blue.
National flags are public symbols, and the flag artwork on Flag Tone comes from the open-source, public-domain flag-icons project. Flag Tone is an independent, fan-made educational color memory game.