Hello!

I have a quick question for you: What did you think of last week's difficulty? Please leave your answer here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfeb1F4MXchDj5qrCUN0RLc8uGi2qolZRqFnTyJq3OO61yElA/viewform?usp=publish-editor

I would love the puzzle to feel approachable to a wide audience. But the general difficulty level does leave out a lot of potential puzzlers. This is something I struggle with a lot. The worst thing I could do is to make the puzzles overall easier, boring out you, the current fans of the puzzle. But the harder I make them, the fewer will enjoy solving them. To make the puzzles easy enough for a beginner while still keeping them interesting to seasoned solvers is one of the hardest problems of making these

Maybe I should have an additional easy puzzle per day? But I simply don't have the bandwidth to do that, at least with non-clue quips. Maybe the daily easy puzzle could work without the quips? What about sharing, should you be able to share the easy result as well, or would that bloat your result threads? A lot of questions I don't know the answer to.

Just sharing some thoughts. This is something that might come eventually, but is not at the top of my list. If you have any thoughts, please leave them in the above questionnaire as well!

So, what do the stats say about last week's puzzles? Seems to be on the easier side. Probably since I was hanging out with some friends who weren't familiar with the puzzle. I had the opportunity to follow their journey, see how a fresh solver perceives the difficulty, and how their solving skills advance throughout the week. I believe this affected my judgement, erring on the side of easier puzzles. I thought I'd blow their socks off on Sunday, and I did, but quite surprisingly the median solve time on Sunday is faster than on Saturday. A few more hints were taken, so seems like it was a harder puzzle, but apparently solve times don't always correlate with difficulty. Anyway, well done everyone!

Mon 2026-05-18 (Easy): 1m 14s / 1m 49s / 3m 16s / 58% / 83%
Tue 2026-05-19 (Medium): 1m 33s / 2m 17s / 3m 58s / 55% / 80%
Wed 2026-05-20 (Tricky): 2m 3s / 3m 6s / 5m 54s / 43% / 75%
Thu 2026-05-21 (Tricky): 2m 17s / 3m 38s / 7m 9s / 34% / 76%
Fri 2026-05-22 (Tricky): 2m 15s / 3m 33s / 6m 46s / 44% / 72%
Sat 2026-05-23 (Tricky): 3m 6s / 5m 9s / 9m 43s / 37% / 67%
Sun 2026-05-24 (Hard): 2m 57s / 4m 45s / 9m 14s / 35% / 62%

Then we have some bonus puzzles! This time I rated two of them Brutal. I haven't used it in months, but maybe it's time to bring it back. Brutal is somewhere between Hard and Evil: You will most likely end up running through some hypothetical scenarios, and you might have to get very creative with the two available corner tags.

#1 Medium - https://cluesbysam.com/archive/ec2a9fafbfc3
#2 Tricky - https://cluesbysam.com/archive/aaa2cd15fa3d
#3 Brutal - https://cluesbysam.com/archive/ae97c7a310f3
#4 Brutal - https://cluesbysam.com/archive/8366951bcf40

One free tip! If you find the "Exactly two criminals in row 1 have a criminal directly below them" type of clues hard to decipher, try this: Read the above as "There are exactly 2 stacks of criminals in rows 1 and 2", and try to see in which ways you can place those stacks in there. Hope this helps!

I'm still working on making the community puzzle archive available. I will probably miss my goal of having it available by the end of this month. Work has been slow, partly due to hanging out with said friends. But I'll get there soon! Hang in there!

Until next time, happy solving!

-Sam