In this paper, we present a deterministic
\(\mathsf {CONGEST} \)
algorithm to compute an
O
(
kΔ
)-vertex coloring in
O
(
Δ
/
k
) + log
*
n
rounds, where
Δ
is the maximum degree of the network graph and
k
≥ 1 can be freely chosen. The algorithm is extremely simple: Each node locally computes a sequence of colors and then it
tries colors
from the sequence in batches of size
k
. Our algorithm subsumes many important results in the history of distributed graph coloring as special cases, including Linial’s color reduction [Linial, FOCS’87], the celebrated locally iterative algorithm from [Barenboim, Elkin, Goldenberg, PODC’18], and various algorithms to compute defective and arbdefective colorings. Our algorithm can smoothly scale between several of these previous results and also simplifies the state of the art (
Δ
+ 1)-coloring algorithm. At the cost of losing some of the algorithm’s simplicity we also provide a
O
(
kΔ
)-coloring algorithm in
\(O(\sqrt {\Delta /k})+\log ^{*} n \)
rounds. We also provide improved deterministic algorithms for ruling sets, and, additionally, we provide a tight characterization for 1-round color reduction algorithms.