Exciting times ahead!

For the first time in the history of Clues by Sam, I'm going to share two community created puzzles. Scroll down to the bonus puzzles to try them out!

How did they make them, you may ask. You might even wonder if you can make one yourself. Well, soon you can! As I've mentioned before, I'm working on an editor anyone can use to create their own puzzles to share with friends, family and the community. These two puzzles are the first ones created using a test version of the editor. For now I'm giving access to just a handful of people, since it's still breaking here and there. But you can expect to see more and more community puzzles appearing on your radar!

With these community puzzles you can also expect some new types of clues and deductions. There are many I've considered too ambiguous or evil, but the early adopters have already found clever ways of using them. I'm excited to find new fresh ideas for the puzzles together with you!

In other news, did you notice the change in font usage? Now the non-clues are written in italic. (No, not in Italian, at least yet). A visual distinction between clues and quips has been requested many times, but those requests have also caused much uprise. I understand both sides. Now I decided to finally give it a try, since I've witnessed many beginners struggling to understand that not everything is a clue. I'm hoping this'll help. Let's be open-minded and see how this change feels for a while.

Next, let's have a look at the previous week! You can also find these stats and more on the home page (the link was broken in the last newsletter, sorry about that. Luckily many of you found it on the main page just below the grid). So, how did it go? Looks like you exceeded my expectations on Tuesday. Sunday received lots of feedback for being "fun", which was unexpected for an Evil puzzle, but the percentiles indicate it was still not smooth sailing. Here's the top 1% / 10% / 50% percentiles, % of perfect solves and % of no-hint solves (any better name for these? "hintless solves"? "stubborn solves"?).

Mon 2026-02-09 (Easy): 1m 31s / 2m 11s / 3m 48s / 45% / 87%
Tue 2026-02-10 (Medium): 1m 30s / 2m 10s / 3m 43s / 35% / 90%
Wed 2026-02-11 (Medium): 2m 15s / 3m 32s / 6m 36s / 42% / 74%
Thu 2026-02-12 (Tricky): 2m 16s / 3m 24s / 6m 11s / 51% / 87%
Fri 2026-02-13 (Tricky): 2m 42s / 4m 25s / 8m 31s / 40% / 72%
Sat 2026-02-14 (Hard): 3m 56s / 6m 31s / 12m 36s / 29% / 60%
Sun 2026-02-15 (Evil): 4m 19s / 7m 13s / 13m 52s / 23% / 68%

And finally, the bonus puzzles, with two of them coming from community members:
#1 by Robert: https://cluesbysam.com/s/play/?puzzleId=2c715f-aa0958a8f59ed97f
#2 by Mujie: https://cluesbysam.com/s/play/?puzzleId=49f3f1-9eb600102931a676
#3 Tricky: https://cluesbysam.com/archive/15a80064dd71/
#4 Evil: https://cluesbysam.com/archive/10d7b2f77141/

Hope you like them! The Evil one should keep you busy for a while...

Have a fantastic week!
Sam