Hi there!

How was your week? Did you solve many crimes? What's your take on solving the theft of a set of lockpicks? Is it really a crime to swindle a millionaire or two? And could SamSam really be a thing? (I hope this didn't trigger many automatic spam filters! There are inherent risks in running a daily puzzle about criminals.)

With all these burning questions in mind, we managed to wrap up last week with a real Evil head-scratcher. Only 7% of solvers completed it with no hints or mistakes! This was partly due to it just being really hard, but also, oh my was it easy to miss a valid scenario or two in a certain column! Won't spoil it here in case you didn't do it yourself yet. But if you end up in a case where you're certain the game is wrong, please check out any of these questions on reddit. A big thank you to everyone in the community who again and again have the patience to kindly explain where the issue is! You're awesome!

Here are all the puzzles and results from last week.
Top 1% / 10% / 50% solve times, and % of perfect solves / solves without hints.
Mon 2026-01-19 (Easy): 1m 22s / 1m 59s / 3m 33s / 52% / 83%
Tue 2026-01-20 (Medium): 1m 41s / 2m 42s / 5m 25s / 45% / 67%
Wed 2026-01-21 (Medium): 2m 3s / 3m 13s / 6m 12s / 36% / 69%
Thu 2026-01-22 (Tricky): 2m 29s / 3m 54s / 7m 27s / 35% / 71%
Fri 2026-01-23 (Tricky): 2m 58s / 4m 32s / 8m 7s / 28% / 76%
Sat 2026-01-24 (Hard): 3m 26s / 5m 47s / 11m 25s / 22% / 65%
Sun 2026-01-25 (Evil): 3m 32s / 6m 37s / 15m 3s / 7% / 40%

So still 40% completed Sunday without any hints. That's quite amazing!

If you're interested in seeing a bit more and fequent stats, I finally have a new page available. After creating a free account, you'll be able to access ongoing and past week's puzzles, see your results, and compare them to the stats. This is also a way to link your past results to a persistent account so you won't lose your history, in case you still have it. You can also link your results from several devices, if you're for example playing both on a phone and PC. It's easy, just a press of a button.

In case you're curious how this works technically: All results have been logged from the very first puzzle with an unique locally generated user ID. By linking your local results, you're linking that locally generated user ID to your account. Without this linking, all results exist, but there's no way of knowing whose they are. If you've cleared your local storage recently, causing the ID to be wiped as well, linking the results to you is harder. I have an idea for how to possibly do this in the future, but not quite yet (Basically, we can together guess your long lost user ID if you can provide a handful of your results from the past puzzles).

So, where is this page, and how do you access it? Well, it's still in early testing, and it might break, so I won't give a direct link here. But if you really want access to it, you'll find it on Reddit. I'll use this indirection as a filter to avoid too many accounts being created just yet, to avoid a big hassle if things go south. Hopefully next week I'll have it in a state I'm confident to share! But as said, feel free to look it up on Reddit if you want to give it a try. If you already did, and it didn't work, please try again. There's some occasional downtime as I'm improving the system. (Sorry if you simply don't want to touch Reddit, or don't know what it is. I've got you covered soon!)

Alright, that's a lot about a feature I'm not even sharing here yet! I hope you're still here, since here are the bonus puzzles! Feel free to share the Easy one with anyone new to the game. And why not the Hard and Evil one as well, but don't give them a fright!
#1 Easy - https://cluesbysam.com/archive/6170a457eed5
#2 Hard - https://cluesbysam.com/archive/42ef48c3ba76
#3 Evil - https://cluesbysam.com/archive/b97de6242547

I hope you have a great week!

-Sam