I could never get into Wordle or any of its derivatives—I just hate guessing games. Clues By Sam, which turns the once-a-day puzzle format into a logic puzzle, is more my speed.
Wordle is a game about knowing five-letter words. Unfortunately for me, as soon as someone prompts me to name a five-letter word, I forget every word in the English language. I could not be worse at Wordle if I tried, which is unfortunate because many of the group chats I’m in are sustained by posting Wordle scores—or scores of the many, many derivatives of Wordle. It turns out “guess something until you run out of guesses” is a pretty solid framework for a game, and my friends enjoy versions like Tradle, where you guess the country based on their exports, or Framed, where you guess movies with just one frame.
The only game of this genre that has tickled my fancy even a little bit has been Clues By Sam, developed by Finnish developer Ad Artis Oy, who may or may not be named Sam. The game presents you with a five-by-five grid of characters with professions. The goal is to guess which characters are innocents and which are criminals. You’re given one clue to start, and each time you correctly guess whether a character is innocent or guilty you’re given another clue. A key feature of Clues By Sam is that the game doesn’t let you guess–if you mark someone criminal or innocent before the game’s designer thinks you’d be able to know that from what’s in front of you, a pop-up appears to stop you from entering your answer.
Weirdly, Clues By Sam reminds me of SAT prep questions, which are worded extremely specifically so that you can divine the correct answer even if you’re not especially well versed in the topic. And after you’re done, just like Wordle, you’re given a little emoji grid you can copy and paste to share with your friends.
I got Riley hooked on the game almost immediately after mentioning it at a meeting (Luke took one look at it and said he’d never touch it, based solely on the font it uses.). It’s a nice little thing to do as my last thing before falling asleep. It’s easy enough that I can complete it every day—it helps that you can ask for basically as many hints as you want, which will point you toward a relevant clue on the grid and then, if you ask again, which character you want to be focusing on—but also just tough enough to get my brain moving.
“I think it's a really interesting game, even though I find it a little hard to wrap my head around,” Riley told me. “Some of that is the ways it doesn't let you make notes (if I know one person is innocent and another is guilty, I can't indicate that on the game board somehow, like you would in an online sudoku or something) and the way that you sometimes have to keep a lot of clues in your head at once. I really like the way it prevents you from guessing, but I think sometimes that makes it feel like the thing you're solving is the creator's logic rather than the puzzle itself. It feels really constrained to me in a way that I think is ultimately good and necessary, but that as a newcomer to it I definitely find myself clashing with as I learn it.”
As Riley later said—it’s Clues By Sam, not Sam’s Generic Clues. Still, the personal nature of the game is what makes me like it. Wordle took off because it was so clearly one dude’s project; famously, he developed it as a word game for his wife. Clues By Sam has that same level of specificity. I wonder if Sam would be proud of how quickly I can solve his puzzles.
