- 2017
- 2022
- 2023
Three canvases in nine years. None since 2023.
April 2017, April 2022, July 2023, and nothing since. Every edition with its dates, canvas size, palette and player count, plus a map of the real world that has been open the whole time and does not end in a whiteout.
- Open every day, not one week a year
- No account for your first 50 pixels
- Nothing resets and nothing whites out
| Year | When | Canvas | Palette | Players |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | April 1 to 3, 2017 | 1,000 by 1,000 | 16 colors | over 1 million |
| 2018 | no edition | no canvas | no canvas | not published |
| 2022 | April 1 to 5, 2022 | 1,000 by 1,000, expanded to 2,000 by 2,000 | 16 colors, expanded to 32 | over 10.5 million |
| 2023 | July 20 to 25, 2023 | 1,000 by 1,000, expanded six times to 3,000 by 2,000 | 8 colors, expanded to 32 | not published |
| 2024 | no edition | no canvas | no canvas | not published |
| 2025 | no edition | no canvas | no canvas | not published |
| 2026 | nothing announced | no canvas | no canvas | not published |
| 2027 | nothing announced | no canvas | no canvas | not published |
The palettes
The palette is what makes each canvas look like its year. Sixteen colors in 2017 is why everything from that canvas has the same flat poster look, and why the 2022 images do not. Every color anyone had, drawn at size.
2017: 16 colors
2022: 16 colors, expanded to 32
The exact colors of the 2023 set are not published, so nothing is drawn for it rather than a guess at one. Each final canvas, with the community atlas that labels it, is on the r/place map page.
The cooldown, year by year
The cooldown is the constraint the whole event is built on: one pixel, then a wait, so every pixel is a decision and every artwork is a negotiation.
- 2017: 5 to 20 minutes, depending on whether your email was verified.
- 2022: 5 minutes.
- 2023: 5 minutes.
Place Pixels has no cooldown on its world map. You spend from a wallet that refills over time, so a whole building goes down in one save and the wait happens while you are away rather than between every click.
What each year was
2017
The first one. A million people, one thousand squares on a side, and a cooldown long enough that every pixel was a decision.
Reddit closed the canvas on April 3 and left the final image up.
2018
Reddit ran a different April Fools experiment and left r/place closed.
2022
Ten times the players of 2017, on a canvas that doubled twice while they worked, ended by a whiteout nobody could outpaint.
Reddit cut the palette to white only, and the canvas was painted blank inside an hour.
2023
The one that broke the April pattern. It started in July, opened with eight colors, and grew six times before the whiteout.
The palette dropped to grayscale for the last hours, then to white, and the canvas went blank.
2024
The first year without a canvas after two in a row. April 1 passed, and Reddit opened nothing and announced nothing.
2025
A second year with no canvas and no announcement, and the year wplace put the same idea on a map of the whole world.
2026
No date, and a third year running without one.
2027
Too early for a signal either way.
When the next one might run
April 1 in 2017 and again in 2022, then July 20 in 2023. Five years between the first two, fifteen months between the next two, and three years since. Reddit has never published a schedule, and the longest warning anyone has had was four days: the 2022 canvas was announced on March 28. So there is nothing to watch for and no date to hold out for.
The palette gets cut down until the canvas goes white. The final image people keep is the archived one from just before that, not the blank.
Where these numbers come from
Place Pixels figures are the values the game enforces today.
Everything else comes from each project's own site or wiki: wplace.live and its community guidelines for wplace, bplace.art and its in-app chroma store for Better Place, the pxls.space FAQ and wiki for pxls.space, pixelplace.io and the pixelplace wiki for pixelplace.io, ourworldofpixels.com and its community wikis for Our World of Pixels, Wikipedia and Reddit's own announcements for r/place.
Common questions
How many times has r/place run?
Three. April 2017, April 2022, and July 2023.
Was there an r/place in 2024 or 2025?
No. April 1 came and went with no canvas in either year.
Why did r/place 2023 run in July?
Reddit gave no reason. It broke the April Fools pattern the first two had set, and it was the year Reddit's API pricing change closed thousands of third-party apps.
How does r/place end?
By running out of colors. In 2022 the palette dropped to white only; in 2023 it went to grayscale and then to white. The canvas is painted blank within about an hour either way.
What was the r/place cooldown?
5 to 20 minutes in 2017, depending on whether your email was verified, and 5 minutes in both 2022 and 2023. One pixel per wait, every time.
Is r/place coming back?
Reddit has announced no r/place for 2026, and none ran in 2024 or 2025 either.
One shared map of the real world, cut into 10-meter squares. Find the street you live on, pick a color, and paint it.
start painting