How to Master Mosaic
TLDR: A famous painting rebuilds itself on screen, one cell at a time, in random order. Name it from the list before the canvas fills. The catalogue holds exactly 20 works, and the score falls with every cell that appears, so an early guess is worth far more than a sure one. Learn the four look-alike pairs and most of the difficulty goes away.
How a Round Works
The game picks one of 20 public-domain paintings and paints it onto a canvas, one cell at a time. The order is random, but it comes from the round seed, so the same seed always paints the same picture in the same order. A painting holds between 89,000 and 100,000 cells, and the reveal spreads them over 100 ticks.
The tick interval accelerates as your streak advances. The baseline gives 390 ms a row, and each consecutive win shaves another 10 ms off the interval down to 90 ms, so later rounds reveal significantly faster. Nothing else about the round changes.
Under the canvas sits a list of titles. Tap the right one and the round ends at once. After every guess the game shows the artist, the year, the art movement and a line about the work, which is where most of the learning happens.
The Twenty Works
The catalogue is fixed, so it rewards study. Ten works come from photographs of figurative or early abstract paintings:
The Starry Night (Van Gogh, 1889) · The Great Wave (Hokusai, 1831) · The Scream (Munch, 1893) · The Shipwreck (Turner, 1810) · Composition (Kandinsky, 1913) · Woman with a Hat (Matisse, 1905) · Udnie (Picabia, 1913) · Composition VII (Kandinsky, 1913) · Feathers (Klimt-style, 1908) · a Roman mosaic (3rd century).
The other ten are hard-edge and colour-field works, drawn as vector art:
Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow (Mondrian, 1930) · Broadway Boogie Woogie (Mondrian, 1943) · Black Square (Malevich, 1915) · Black Cross (Malevich, 1915) · Orange and Red (Rothko, 1961) · Yellow and Blue (Rothko, 1955) · Homage to the Square in Yellow (Albers, 1959) · Homage to the Square in Blue (Albers, 1965) · Onement I (Newman, 1948) · Abstract Painting (Black) (Reinhardt, 1963).
Learn the two halves differently. The ten photographic works have a subject, so a silhouette settles them: the curved foam of the Great Wave, the figure in the Scream, the cypress and the swirling sky of the Starry Night. The ten geometric works have no subject at all. They are settled by layout · bands, a grid, nested squares, one vertical stripe.
💡 Tip: Spend ten minutes looking up the list above before your first run. The catalogue never changes, so that ten minutes pays out in every round you ever play.
The Score Falls With Every Cell
✅ The formula is simple and harsh. Your score is 1,000 × (cells still hidden ÷ total cells). Guess on the first few cells and you take almost the full 1,000. Guess at the last cell and you take nothing. A wrong guess scores 0 and ends the streak, so the real choice is how much certainty you are willing to buy.
⚠️ Caution · waiting is never free. The score drops on every single cell, not in steps. A guess at 20% revealed pays 800, and the same guess at 60% pays 400. If you would have been right at 20%, half the points went to nothing.
Telling the Near-Twins Apart
Four pairs and one trio hold almost all the mistakes in this game.
The dark three. Black Square, Black Cross and Abstract Painting (Black) all read as “dark” in the first fragments. Black Square is one solid block on white. Black Cross has two arms that reach the edges. The Reinhardt is near black across the whole canvas with no white at all, so if you see no white, it is the Reinhardt.
💡 Tip: The other three pairs split on colour alone. The Rothkos are Orange and Red against Yellow and Blue. The Alberses are nested squares in yellow against nested squares in blue. The Mondrians both use a white ground with primary blocks, but Broadway Boogie Woogie has no thick black lines · its lines are yellow and broken into small squares.
The two Kandinskys are the last pair. Composition (1913) and Composition VII (1913) share a palette, so wait a little longer on those two rather than guess between them early.
Common Mistakes
⚠️ Caution · do not hunt for brushwork. Each cell is one flat colour from a 45-colour palette. Composition, shape and dominant colour survive that. Brushstroke texture and fine line work do not, so you cannot pick out a Van Gogh by its strokes. Read the large shapes.
Reading the whole canvas. The cells arrive from everywhere at once, so there is no scan line to follow and no point in staring at one corner. Take in the whole frame and let the shape build.
Ignoring the frame itself. Each painting keeps the shape of the original, so a tall canvas and a wide one are already different works. The frame is free evidence before a single cell appears.
Skipping the line under the answer. The artist, year and movement after each round are the game’s teaching part. Read them and the next round is easier.
A Practice Routine
💡 Tip: Play five rounds on Easy first and do not chase the score. Watch what each work looks like at 10% and at 25%, and name the one feature that told you. Then move to Medium and play for points. Keep a short list of the works you confuse, and look at those two side by side once. That fixes the pair for good.
The skill here transfers. You learn to commit to a reading of incomplete evidence, and to know which detail is worth waiting for and which is not.
Mosaic
A famous painting paints itself row by row from coloured-emoji squares. Guess the work before the scanline finishes
Play nowWorks on any device.