2026 is almost here!

Every time I upload a new puzzle, I type in the date. This has made me very aware of what date it is. Still, I can't believe it's almost 2026! I wonder how long it'll take me to learn typing the correct year, as 2025 is now deeply ingrained in my muscle memory.

And what a year 2025 has been! Clues by Sam was published in May this year, and so much has happened since. After publishing nearly 250 daily puzzles (not including the bonus puzzles and puzzle packs), it's fun to look back at how things went. Ensuring there's a puzzle available every day has been a considerable effort, but thankfully all the amazing support through Puzzle Pack purchases has made it possible for me to spend actual working hours on it, and not just all my free time. And of course all your amazing feedback makes it all worth it! Thank you everyone for your support!

However, it's hard to publish hundreds of puzzles without making a mistake here and there. You might remember Xia the mech disguised as clown, or the two persons who had "an odd number of common neighbours". I was able to react and fix them quickly (thanks to the puzzles going live 7am Finnish time, except during a confusing period when switching from daylight saving time). And then there are all the smaller typos, like "A backlo of crime" as a recent newsletter title. But besides these missteps, it's been pretty solid! Despite many, many, many, MANY reports of "the game doesn't allow me to make a valid deduction", there hasn't been a proven error of this nature in 6 months. This is of course thanks to the advanced algorithm I created to prove all possible deductions, since I'm not smart enough to find them all by hand. Still, I'm thankful for every single report, since it means you care about the game, and it's always fun to see where you get stuck!

What will next year look like then? My top priorities at the moment are: A login system so you can preserve and share your stats, easier access to previous puzzles (at least the ongoing and previous week), and tools that allow you to make your own puzzles. The tools could also be used to translate existing puzzles to other langauges, though I'd also like to eventually automate the translations as much as possible. I'm super excited about these features, and I hope you are as well!

But before wrapping up this year, here are last week's puzzles and results! The numbers are top 1% / 10% / 50% solve times, and % of solves without any hints or mistakes / number of solves without any hints. I've filtered them to the best of my ability so they would be truthful (there really are some unbelievably fast solvers out there!), and hopefully they will become even more accurate with the upcoming login system.

Mon 2025-12-22 (Easy) 1m 15s / 1m 46s / 2m 57s / 51% / 89%
Tue 2025-12-23 (Medium) 2m 1s / 3m 7s / 5m 45s / 45% / 79%
Wed 2025-12-24 (Medium) 1m 52s / 2m 53s / 5m 20s / 39% / 78%
Thu 2025-12-25 (Tricky) 2m 43s / 4m 9s / 7m 35s / 35% / 75%
Fri 2025-12-26 (Tricky) 3m 24s / 5m 29s / 10m 23s / 22% / 54%
Sat 2025-12-27 (Tricky) 2m 2s / 3m 6s / 5m 49s / 41% / 80%
Sun 2025-12-28 (Hard) 3m 33s / 6m 4s / 12m 11s / 20% / 50%

And here are the weekly bonus puzzles:
#1 Medium - https://cluesbysam.com/archive/9511dc277046
#2 Tricky - https://cluesbysam.com/archive/63d860753db9
#3 Hard - https://cluesbysam.com/archive/af4b03bc93e3
#4 Evil - https://cluesbysam.com/archive/853530e65aac

Happy solving, and Happy New Year!
-Sam