Hey!

Did you already spot the new little feature?
I've been sharing top solve speed percentiles in the newsletters, but there was always a problem: It's not very interesting to see how you did compared to others one week later, when you already forgot what the puzzle even was. So recently I introduced a new small feature: If you're one of the fastest 1% / 5% / 10% / 25% / 50% solvers, you will be congratulated accordingly in the result view. Also, if you manage to do a perfect solve, you'll get a precentage telling you how many others achieved the same feat!

Just one small disclaimer: In case you're from Australia and are solving the daily puzzle with your afternoon coffee, or for some other reason you happen to be one of the first ones to solve the puzzle, the data isn't very accurate yet. For the first handful of solvers the stats won't even be visible, since there's no one else to compare to! But if you come back later, you will find the refreshed stats. The numbers stabilize fairly quickly, but they might still change a bit towards the end of the day.

But what happens if you don't reach the top 50%, or don't get a perfect solve? Will you never see any interesting stats for the puzzle?
Don't worry! I'm working on a page where you can view the stats for at least the ongoing and previous week's puzzles. This page will also provide links to those puzzles in case you missed any. I will hopefully have it available latest next week!

Until then, I'll be sharing the stats (and links) here. Let's have a look at last week, how did it go? Well, it was quite tough! At least Thursday and Friday were somewhat tougher than intended. I had to break the rule of "difficulty goes up every day" to give you some time to breathe, so Saturday was a much gentler "Tricky". But for those craving for challenge, I hope Sunday didn't disappoint you!

The stats are top 1% / 10% / 50% solve times, and % of perfect solves (no hints/mistakes) and % of solves with no hints. There's also been some requests for solve times of perfect solves. I shared those once last year, but they weren't that interesting: They were almost the same as non-perfect solves, but slightly faster (probably since the best solvers are both fast and precise). But I will probably add an option for viewing them on the stats page once it's out!

Mon 2026-01-05 (Easy): 1m 39s / 2m 30s / 4m 32s / 44% / 75%
Tue 2026-01-06 (Medium): 1m 51s / 2m 54s / 5m 47s / 33% / 60%
Wed 2026-01-07 (Medium): 2m 5s / 3m 15s / 6m 6s / 41% / 68%
Thu 2026-01-08 (Tricky): 3m 0s / 5m 2s / 9m 52s / 21% / 61%
Fri 2026-01-09 (Tricky): 3m 16s / 5m 27s / 10m 36s / 23% / 56%
Sat 2026-01-10 (Tricky): 2m 26s / 3m 49s / 7m 17s / 35% / 70%
Sun 2026-01-11 (Hard): 3m 46s / 6m 9s / 11m 56s / 30% / 65%

Perhaps the stats page could also show the stats for bonus puzzles? Speaking of bonus puzzles...
#1 Easy - https://cluesbysam.com/archive/bfeeff30495e
#2 Medium - https://cluesbysam.com/archive/6de4e09aa2da
#3 Hard - https://cluesbysam.com/archive/67c47b9e5ff8
#4 Evil - https://cluesbysam.com/archive/24506247859d

I'm also excited to get stats visible for puzzle packs eventually... If you didn't get a puzzle pack yet, check out https://cluesbysam.com/s/packs.html

Have fun puzzling, and have a great week!

-Sam