It is May!

The northern hemisphere is celebrating spring, while the ones upside down are already putting down their scythes and pulling on their wool socks. What an odd world we live in! Even in the north, 1st of May is confusing. Are we celebrating spring or labour? Some countries hardly even celebrate.

But one thing is still celebrated on 1st of May around the globe in unison: It's the anniversary of Clues by Sam!

The first daily puzzle I considered ripe for the public audience was released 1st of May 2025. Since then, there's been a new puzzle every day. Soon after I also started releasing this newsletter, sharing a couple of bonus puzzles once a week. And then there are the 2 puzzle packs (I should get started on the 3rd one soon). Considering the grid size of 20 people, and assuming that 50% of the population are criminals (at least more criminal than an average person), that's over 6,000 criminals caught last year!

If you want to re-live all that, you're in luck! As I've been promising for a while, the Daily Archive is finally available! You can either subscribe for a Premium Membership, or you can purchase the 2025 Daily Archive for yourself, which comes with a free 1 year Premium Membership as a gift. The membership will soon include some additional content, like access to the newsletter archive.
The Full Daily Archive: https://cluesbysam.com/s/home/daily-archive.php
(You first need to create a free account if you haven't already. Highly recommended!)

Setting up the archive was surprisingly tricky. For example, earlier puzzles didn't have hints, corner tags, or profession and name highlighting (In case you didn't know, repeatedly tapping on a clue referencing a name or profession makes them bounce). There were also two known logic errors, in May and June. These are now fixed, though you might still find a missing profession highlight here and there. I'm hoping to hear about those, so I can fix them ASAP!

Also, no stats were gathered from the first puzzles, and only the number of hints/errors was logged for a long time. I had to pull together what I had from many different sources and formats, and process them into something presentable. If you still have old results stored locally (you might if you never clear your browsing data), you can head over to the Account page and upload them. Seeing your old results listed on the archive page is fun, and it will increase the accuracy of the stats. The upload button is also useful if you often complete the puzzle with poor network connection, preventing the result from being logged properly.

There's one interesting thing to note about the stats of the old puzzles: If you go through the archive and compare your results with the stats, you might be surprised by your performance. Up until May 22nd, no stats were logged, so you're now only comparing to a bunch of experienced solvers going through the archive. Don't let it bring you down. Then again, starting May 22nd you might notice that you're hitting way better percentiles than in contemporary puzzles. It's not a bug! Results back then were just not as good! It was a new puzzle back then, we hadn't had any practice yet! We also didn't have corner tags, hints, highlights and other luxuries we now have. If you want to see what the puzzles looked like on the day of release, you can use the "Share Scenario" link to view the vintage version.

I'm still going back and forth between which results to include in the archive stats. Should they include the new results or not? Maybe I'll introduce an option so you can choose for yourself.

Well, that was a lot of detail about stats! I know many care about the stats, so I want to be transparent about why they are the way they are. If you don't care about stats, I hope you skipped over all that. Because now... we have more stats! Last week was pretty smooth. Sunday was surprisingly easy compared to Saturday. Friday was the anniversary puzzle, so go solve it if you missed it! I wanted it to feel a bit special, and I'm happy it didn't turn out too easy or difficult.
Top 1% / 10% / 50% solve times, % of perfect solves and % of solves without hints.

Mon 2026-04-27 (Easy): 1m 24s / 2m 5s / 3m 44s / 50% / 84%
Tue 2026-04-28 (Medium): 1m 46s / 2m 37s / 4m 45s / 47% / 74%
Wed 2026-04-29 (Medium): 2m 13s / 3m 29s / 6m 42s / 48% / 71%
Thu 2026-04-30 (Tricky): 2m 10s / 3m 24s / 6m 22s / 37% / 76%
Fri 2026-05-01 (Tricky): 2m 39s / 4m 13s / 7m 39s / 38% / 63%
Sat 2026-05-02 (Hard): 3m 53s / 6m 14s / 12m 1s / 26% / 58%
Sun 2026-05-03 (Hard): 3m 35s / 5m 51s / 11m 36s / 22% / 54%

And here are the bonus puzzles! Having access to an archive of old bonus puzzles will soon be part of the Premium Membership too! (But that does NOT mean I won't keep sharing them in the newsletter.) This time around they are a bit easier than usual, no evil ones. By the way, most of you were asking for more tricky puzzles in the poll a few weeks back. Doesn't mean I won't be sharing evil ones in the future!

#1 Easy - https://cluesbysam.com/archive/8604a932bae1
#2 Tricky - https://cluesbysam.com/archive/5fce6111dd5f
#3 Tricky - https://cluesbysam.com/archive/def54bdfc315

And here's the community puzzle thread on Reddit. Not that many puzzles this week, but I know there are many more being made that aren't shared on Reddit. Having them listed on the home page soon is a very high priority for me! Thank you everyone making these fantastic puzzles!
https://www.reddit.com/r/CluesBySamHelp/comments/1sy1a70/weekly_community_puzzles_april_27may_3_2026/

That's it! I wish you a fantastic spring/autumn! Please go purchase the Daily Archive if you want to support Clues by Sam, or want to re-live a piece of history, or just want 365 puzzles to solve. A huge, huge thanks to everyone who already did!

Best,
Sam