ently I mentioned that the "Tutorial" button has been replaced with a "Pause" button for those who are logged in (with the assumption that if you have an account, you won't need the tutorial anymore). What I didn't mention was that there is actually a new tutorial available!

If you're subscribing to this newsletter, you are likely to already be familiar with how the puzzle works. However, I know there are many out there who don't know about the second corner tags or tap-to-highlight techniques. If this sounds like you, or you just want to check out a fun tutorial, you can find it here:
https://cluesbysam.com/s/tutorial/

In addition to a new tutorial, there's also a new video by Ambie where she plays through the tutorial. Thank you Ambie!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHkv2SIaSDU

If you have some friends or family who never got the hang of the puzzle, you might want to link these to them. Maybe it'll encourage them to give the puzzle another shot. I would appreciate that a lot! Thank you in advance!

Hi!

Last week was another interesting one. The puzzles were quite easy, or at least the median times were fast. Still there weren't (m)any complaints that they were too easy. Maybe a puzzle can be fun without making your brain melt? Then again Saturday and Sunday posed the opposite question: Can a puzzle that makes your brain melt be fun? Especially Sunday was one of the hardest daily puzzles in a while. But I hope you still enjoyed it!

Top 1% / 10% / 50% solve times, % perfect solves and % no hint solves

Mon 2026-07-20 (Easy): 1m 39s / 2m 27s / 4m 32s / 53% / 82%
Tue 2026-07-21 (Easy): 1m 18s / 1m 53s / 3m 18s / 61% / 86%
Wed 2026-07-22 (Tricky): 1m 59s / 3m 10s / 5m 54s / 51% / 77%
Thu 2026-07-23 (Tricky): 1m 47s / 2m 39s / 4m 54s / 51% / 82%
Fri 2026-07-24 (Tricky): 1m 56s / 3m 2s / 5m 57s / 40% / 77%
Sat 2026-07-25 (Hard): 3m 9s / 5m 23s / 10m 42s / 23% / 49%
Sun 2026-07-26 (Hard): 3m 34s / 6m 20s / 13m 23s / 18% / 48%

You can also find these an more on the home page!

And as usual, here are the weekly bonus puzzles. Nothing special, just some plain old fun criminals to catch!

#1 Tricky - https://cluesbysam.com/archive/3b42b97e978a
#2 Hard - https://cluesbysam.com/archive/0f55d0be4039
#3 Evil - https://cluesbysam.com/archive/55499641e443

There was a bit of an issue with community puzzle ratings last week. First of all, I realized that when playing the puzzles through the newsletter links, there's no rating option available. Still those plays were counted towards the rating. This resulted in the rating system seeing a lot of people playing the puzzles without recommending them, making it think the puzzles can't be that good.

So what did I do? I applied a quick fix so that plays through the newsletter links wouldn't be included in the rating. A few days later I noticed that I'd made a small mistake and no results were included in the rating! I applied another fix, just to break it in another way, and fixed it yet again a few days later. Now they seem fine. In short, the thumb-ups for the puzzles I'm about to share shouldn't start dropping like they did last week. Sorry to the creators of past shared puzzles!

So, here are some of the best rated community puzzles from last week. Here're a couple of tips before you dig into them:
1) For the first community puzzle, remember that "connected" has to be connected within that unit. "All criminal neighbours are connected" means the criminal neighbours need to be connected through each other and not through, for example, the person in the center of the neighbourhood.
2) The two other puzzles use clues like "Sam has the most criminal neighbours". I tend not to use these much as they can be quite jarring. But I found them quite fun in these two! Just remember to count everyone. It's astonishingly hard to quickly scan how many criminal/innocent neighbours everyone has.
#1 Tricky - https://cluesbysam.com/s/share/?puzzleId=ed0c6c-d8fa97af401ea931
#2 Tricky - https://cluesbysam.com/s/share/?puzzleId=a8611a-fd831d19dcfdcf1a
#3 Hard - https://cluesbysam.com/s/share/?puzzleId=1832eb-92227577149c8bfa

That's it! Until next time!

-Sam