Understanding the grid

A Gradientle puzzle is a rectangular grid of colored tiles. The four corner tiles are locked in place - they define the gradient's extent and cannot be moved. Your job is to arrange the scrambled interior tiles so that colors transition smoothly from corner to corner in every direction.

The puzzle is solved when every tile sits in its correct position. Adjacent tiles should have colors that are close to each other, with larger color jumps reserved for tiles that are farther apart. The grid is complete when every transition looks continuous - no sudden jumps, no tiles that look out of place.

Start with the corners

Your first move should always be to study the four fixed corners. They give you the entire gradient's roadmap:

• The top-left and top-right corners show you the horizontal gradient along the top edge.
• The bottom-left and bottom-right corners show you the horizontal gradient along the bottom edge.
• Comparing top-left to bottom-left gives you the vertical gradient on the left side.
• Comparing top-right to bottom-right gives you the vertical gradient on the right side.

Once you understand the four corner relationships, you can predict where any tile roughly belongs before placing it. Tiles near the top-left corner should look similar to top-left. Tiles near the center should be a blend of all four corners.

Work the edges before the center

Edge tiles (tiles along the border of the grid, not in a corner) are constrained on two sides. A tile on the top edge has to match the top-left corner color on its left side and the top-right corner color on its right side - so there's much less ambiguity about where it belongs compared to an interior tile, which can vary freely.

Establish the edges first, then fill in the center using the edges as additional reference points. This order dramatically reduces the search space and usually leads to fewer total moves.

Sort warm vs. cool first

Gradients often shift in color temperature - one side warm (reds, oranges, yellows) and the other cool (blues, greens, purples). Before placing any specific tile, do a quick mental sort of the entire scrambled grid into warm and cool halves.

If your grid has a warm-to-cool diagonal - say, orange at top-left and blue at bottom-right - tiles near the top-left should feel warm, tiles near the bottom-right should feel cool, and tiles in the center should feel neutral. Rough sorting first, precise placement second.

This technique also helps when you're stuck: if a tile doesn't seem to belong anywhere, check its temperature. A tile that's warmer than everything around it probably belongs in a different quadrant entirely.

Read hue, saturation, and brightness separately

When a tile doesn't look quite right in its position, try to identify which property is off rather than just "something is wrong."

• Hue - the color name (red, orange, blue, green). Is this tile drifting toward the wrong color family?
• Saturation - the intensity or vividness. Is this tile more vivid or more muted than its neighbors?
• Value - the brightness. Is this tile lighter or darker than expected for its position?

A tile that's wrong in all three dimensions is obviously misplaced. A tile that's only slightly off in one dimension might be close - look for a neighboring tile with the opposite imbalance and try swapping them.

Trust your eye - the math is on your side

Gradientle uses OKLAB color math for all gradient calculations. OKLAB is a perceptual color space where equal numerical steps look equal to human eyes - unlike RGB, where the "midpoint" between two colors can look unbalanced or muddy.

The practical result: the gradient always has a clear visual logic, and your perceptual system is a reliable tool for solving it. If something looks wrong, it probably is. If a tile looks slightly off relative to its neighbors, trust that instinct. You don't need to think in terms of color theory to play well - just trust what you see.

In particular: always check a tile in context, not in isolation. A tile might look perfectly fine when you're looking at it alone, but obviously wrong once you see how it interacts with its four neighbors. Place, check neighbors, then decide whether to keep or swap.

Scoring and rating

Your score is based on how many moves you make compared to the theoretical minimum number of moves needed to solve the puzzle from its scrambled state. Fewer moves relative to that minimum means a higher rating.

The minimum move count is calculated from the permutation structure of the scrambled tiles - it's the fewest swaps needed to sort everything into place if you always swapped the right tiles. In practice, you'll often take more moves than the minimum because you're solving by eye rather than optimal graph traversal - and that's completely normal.

Each hint used costs 0.1 rating points. Hints are worth using when you're genuinely stuck - a small rating penalty is better than a large move count from random guessing.

Using hints strategically

Hints reveal which tiles are already in the correct position by highlighting them. They don't tell you where a wrong tile should go - just which ones are already right.

Best times to use a hint:

• When you think the puzzle is solved but the game isn't registering a win - a hint will reveal which tile is still misplaced.
• When you've placed about half the grid and aren't sure which remaining tiles are settled - a hint confirms your progress and lets you focus on the unconfirmed section.
• When you're stuck between two tiles that seem equally plausible for a position - a hint can eliminate one possibility.

Avoid using hints as a first resort. Working through the logic builds your color sense over time, which pays off in future puzzles.

Common mistakes

• 1

  Placing a tile that looks right in isolation but wrong in context. Always check all four neighbors after placing a tile, not just the one you swapped with.

• 2

  Ignoring one corner. It's easy to focus on three corners and overlook the fourth. Check all four relationships before committing to a placement strategy.

• 3

  Random trial swaps. If you're guessing, slow down. Reasoning from the corners outward is almost always faster than random swapping, and it costs fewer moves.

• 4

  Swapping settled tiles. Once you've confirmed (or hinted) that a tile is correct, leave it alone. Moving it to accommodate another placement almost always costs extra moves to fix.

Getting better over time

Gradientle gets measurably easier with practice. The game exercises your ability to distinguish subtle color differences - particularly in hue and saturation - that most people don't normally pay conscious attention to.

After a few weeks of daily play, most players find they can identify misplaced tiles almost immediately. What previously required careful analysis starts to feel intuitive: a tile that's slightly too purple in a mostly-green region just looks wrong, the same way a misspelled word looks wrong to an experienced reader.

The daily format helps because each gradient is distinct. You're not memorizing a solution - you're practicing the underlying skill of reading color relationships, which transfers across every new puzzle.

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