Clues by Mara

In October last year, I stumbled across Clues by Sam. It's a daily logic puzzle game sort of like Wordle in that it's on a grid and once you solve it you can see and share a little graphic to show how you did. I don't remember how I found it, but since then I have played it almost every day. It resets at midnight Eastern Time, so when I'm in Canada I play every evening and when I'm in Europe I play every morning. Throughout the week, the puzzles get harder and harder, and then the difficulty resets once the week ends. I really love this game, you should check it out!

Another cool thing is that you can (as of recently) see all of the past games and how well you did. I managed to scrape the website to get all my data, and I decided to make a little visualization showing how well I have done and how my ability has improved over time. Every point in the visualization below represents a puzzle. The closer to the top the point is, the better I did in terms of making mistakes, needing hints (I never ask for hints anymore!), and how many other people got it perfect. The closer to the right side it is, the better I did in terms of absolute time taken and also what percentile I was in for speed. The colours indicate how difficult the puzzle was described as, from Easy to Evil, with Easy being green and Evil being red. The points that temporally follow each other are connected by lines.

From looking at the data, there's a diagonal pattern, indicating that my time taken correlates with the errors, but it also ended up just being a bit of a hairball in terms of the lines, which tells me I maybe haven't gotten as much better as I thought I had! I find it interesting that there isn't a strong pattern between difficulty and errors, which lines up with my feeling that I make mistakes on all difficulty levels. I make mistakes on harder puzzles because they're hard, and I make mistakes on easier puzzles because I'm going too fast and I just click the wrong thing. It's pretty clear that the easier puzzles are faster though, especially the for puzzles that I do without any errors!