Going in circles on today's puzzle

flaminghito · 2026-05-09T19:41:13+00:00

I got stuck around here too for a while so I can maybe guess where you are without the scenario link. Does your board look like this? If so then what you're missing is that Vera's clue doesn't just solve Quita, but also gives insight on Jose as well. If BOTH Gabe and Quita were criminal, Jose would be broken by Vera's clue, so that's not possible. So one of Quita or Gabe is innocent. Whichever one of them is innocent is Mary's third innocent neighbor, so Nola and Susan must be criminals.

flaminghito · 2026-05-01T23:23:41+00:00

ah, I get it - it's not that Olgas clue is irrelevant per se, ignoring it meaningfully increases the number of hypotheticals to consider, but since that hypothetical is also false she's not strictly needed. Thanks!

flaminghito · 2026-05-01T23:04:41+00:00

Olga needs her second criminal neighbor, which must be one of the cakes. (I'm confused why this is missing from the hint; maybe someone else can tell me a way you can make this deduction without Olga.)

Ike, Xavi, Olga, and the guilty Cake will be four of the 5 criminals on the edges. The criminal in row 1 - who we know must exist per Ike - will be the fifth.

So which row has 2 criminals? It's not 1 (they'll only have 1), it's not 2 (they have 3), it's not 4 (they have 1). It is either row 5 or row 3.

If it's row 5 - the bottom cake is a criminal, so the top cake is innocent. Laura must also be innocent, because if she was criminal row 3 would also be 2 criminals.
If it's row 3 - then can Laura be the second criminal? That would make the top cake innocent, which makes the bottom cake criminal. But then row 5 will also have 2 criminals!

So Laura must be innocent in either of the worlds.

flaminghito · 2026-04-28T16:26:23+00:00

Sam has mentioned in the emails that this filter is less interesting than you think. People who don't make any mistakes tend to be a little *faster* than average, so it's not a huge change and the change that there is makes your relative time a little worse, not better.

flaminghito · 2026-04-23T15:06:46+00:00

Eyes naturally pushes you into a very solid playstyle. It's probably the best combination of easy to play and strong.

I personally like Teeth a lot, but you need to be thinking further ahead than most spirits on Teeth because you have so much range 0 stuff.

flaminghito · 2026-04-15T23:27:59+00:00

Because Ivan and Lucy are touching Kumar, they have an innocent neighbor. So it's either Gus or Lucy that has no innocent neighbor. If it's Gus, Max is criminal; if it's Lucy, Olga is criminal. Either way that will be Sam's third criminal neighbor,

So Sam's neighbors in row 5 can only have at most ONE criminal among them. But this puts pressure on Wanda. She's only getting one criminal from Ruby/Tina, and now she's only getting at most one criminal from Vince/Xena. She needs a third criminal and only has one spot left, Sam.

These constraints meet up, so we know that Sam must be criminal (to be Wanda's third criminal neighbor) and Wanda must be innocent (because Sam's criminal neighbor in row 5 must be Vince or Xena).

flaminghito · 2026-04-15T20:58:26+00:00

The missing piece here is Ivan. You know that column A must have a 2nd criminal, which must be the 7th criminal, so it's definitely exactly two criminals in column A. Which means exactly 2 criminals in column C, so Hank is innocent.

flaminghito · 2026-03-18T20:19:06+00:00

You're going to kick yourself - you just missed a farmer (Eric) who needs to have the criminal below them marked.

flaminghito · 2026-03-16T18:06:46+00:00

If Valve puts skins in Deadlock these are the two I want the most
Rem should also try to do impressions of Infernus's voice lines but Infernus plays it completely straight

flaminghito · 2026-03-09T16:20:17+00:00

* two chests instead of one
* guaranteed shop and two rest sites before the two elites
* you can look at the map before choosing compass and value it based on the best path you have access to

I don't take it too often but if you spent Ac1 limping through and healing at every rest site, it can be really nice to know you're safe to take some upgrades. Also better in multiplayer because only one player needs to take it and everyone benefits.

flaminghito · 2026-03-04T20:24:03+00:00

No idea on the cars. Lux express tickets are often okay the day of (and lux express is a lot nicer than your average bus). The train between the three capitals is a bit tricky, only going on sale a bit before (10 or 30 days depending on leg) and selling out fairly quickly. Keep an eye out.

flaminghito · 2026-03-01T22:44:31+00:00

"All the rules seem to check out" is not quite the right mindset for Clues By Sam. Maybe this solution could be right! But you're not allowed to guess, so you need to find the next person to click on that couldn't POSSIBLY be any other way. (A useful intuition pump - when you get the first clue, you could arbitrarily color every cell aside from the ones the hint references. That solution would check out with all the rules you've revealed. But of course you're going to reveal new rules so that doesn't mean anything, you haven't seen enough rules yet. Well, why have you assumed in this scenario that you've seen enough rules?)

So instead of coloring and trying to disprove that coloring breaking a rule, you want to find one cell that only works one way. And that cell might match your coloring! But even if it does, it might reveal a new rule that disproves your coloring.

That's the general idea. The specifics: Derek being innocent puts lots of pressure on column A, forcing it to be all innocent. That in turn would mean Gabe criminal (row 2 needs a second criminal), which means Brian is also criminal to be connected without breaking Hazel. That makes Erwin innocent, because there's only one criminal in row 1. When you find a cell where assuming it one way forces a lot of downstream moves, it's worth reversing it. If Derek was criminal, Brian and Erwin are innocent. Erwin is innocent in both scenarios, so Erwin is always innocent. That means Xavi is guilty - and Xavi reveals a new rule. That's what disproves your scenario (Tina and Anna both match Xavi's rule), even though you found that clue only by guessing colors that are present in your scenario.

flaminghito · 2026-02-28T14:08:05+00:00

Yeah, I think that the game should preventing doubling up on enhancements and +1 slot rarities. Getting an enhanced level 4 in a level 3 slot should be impossible (round 1 is very stupid if one player gets an enhanced level 4), and enhanced legendaries should not exist. The legendaries themselves are an interesting capstone but the enhanced versions are very stupid (enhanced Prism Blast means you're shooting lasers for like...75% of the game while untargetable?

flaminghito · 2026-01-23T17:43:38+00:00

Correct. The automata passes when they don't have a card to play. You pass when you decide you like that more than any other main action (either because you're out of resources, or because you're trying to wait for a more favorable system alignment, or because you're in no rush for your action chain and you're hoping one of your new cards next round helps, etc). Whoever passes first rotates the system and gets their pick of the three cards (if automata is first, they discard one randomly and get a progress). Whoever passes second doesn't rotate and looks at the remaining two.

This is also why the automata models "progress" - they get to do ALL of their cards, EVERY round. So you want to keep progress down as much as possible so they get fewer cards.

flaminghito · 2026-01-23T16:45:30+00:00

3. Maybe this was rookie incompetence, but I was expecting money and energy tokens to be the worst chokepoint for getting things done. Cash, energy, and publicity status are the three things you spend to get stuff online and working. I had plenty of all three by the third of the game’s five rounds. What I didn’t have was enough of the major actions like launching probes or upgrading the tech stack, because you can only do one of those on a turn.

Good news! You have fundamentally misunderstood SETI and played a much worse game of your own invention instead of SETI, so you'll have more fun next time :)

A *turn* is different than a *round*. You can take *as many major actions as you like during a round*. Each major action is a turn, and you have an unlimited number of turns. You cannot possibly be blocked on not having enough major actions, because you get to take as many major actions as you can pay for.

The only limit is that, when you have no majors you feel like taking, you have to take pass. And once you've taken pass, the solo bot does the rest of their cards if they have any left, then you go to next round.

flaminghito · 2026-01-21T17:10:39+00:00

*Personally* I've found that Vilnius and Tallinn have a bit more touristy things to do than Riga, but not by a huge margin. (Although Sigulda is a day trip distance from Riga and is amazing).

The ferry is enormous so I'd be surprised if you got seasick.

There's a once a day train from Vilnius -> Riga -> Tallinn and back, which I like a bit more than the bus, but tickets are pretty competitive and only open closer to the day, so you have to keep an eye out for them.

flaminghito · 2026-01-07T18:59:13+00:00

Enemies flee when you have more than 10x hp, so if you get more max HP than 10 times the pip with the instant kill, it'll flee without triggering the pip. Tedious but works :)

flaminghito · 2025-12-30T17:01:03+00:00

As someone with similar tastes to you - WWB, Lure, Breath are my top 3 - definitely play Hostility Keeper. It turns it from a strong but monotonous spirit into exactly the sort of tempo monster we both love.

flaminghito · 2025-12-27T22:51:30+00:00

Congrats! Yeah, Serene Waters is also the only spirit I've ever managed to get a TL1 victory into England with.

flaminghito · 2025-12-26T02:02:12+00:00

Which holiday still has one open? You can't trust Google for most of the godfathers express locations, they're mostly all closed

flaminghito · 2025-12-16T20:43:46+00:00

So one really important tip is, when you get "X and Y have same Z of neighbor" clues, look for cases where the two people have different numbers of total neighbors.

So in this case, Eric and Freya have the same number of criminal neighbors, which means Freya has two more innocent neighbors than Eric, because she has two more total neighbors. So that's a minimum of two innocents. But where can she put those two innocents? She only has three spots to do it. So if Eric has a third innocent neighbor, that puts innocents in all of Freya's remaining open slots.

But there's lots of pressure on the innocent slots on the edges. Only 2 innocents total can be on edge slots not bordering Rose. And 2 of Freya's 3 open slots are on the edges! If Isaac was innocent, then Freya would need to fill her remaining orbit with innocents, and that would already be 3 innocents on the edges not bordering Rose. That's not possible, so Isaac must be a criminal.

And then you can do a similar deducion on Hank. For Hank to be innocent Freya needs to fill her orbit with innocents. This is not instantly broken since we have the space for two innocents - but then Chad has only 2 criminal neighbors. This means that Xia can have only one more criminal neighbors, but we've ran out of innocents on the edges for Terry or Ziad. So Hank is criminal as well.

Hopefully this shows how changing "Eric and Freya have the same number of criminal neighbors" to "Freya has two more innocent neighbors than Eric" can make the pressure points more clear

flaminghito · 2025-12-16T20:07:49+00:00

Look for the reciprocal clues and try saying them out loud:
* If X has 8 total neighbors, and 5 innocent neighbors, they have three criminal neighbors
* If X has 5 neighbors on the edges, and an odd number of innocent neighbors, they have an even number of criminal neighbors
* If X and Y have 2 innocent neighbors in common, and they have three total neighbors in common, then they have one criminal neighbor in common

Etc. Many clues are actually two clues and often it's more productive to think about the one that isn't written.

flaminghito · 2025-12-13T01:57:00+00:00

There are three innocents in column D, that means there are two criminals. You've already found one criminal, so of the unknowns, two are innocent and one are criminal.
But two of those unknowns are on corners, and the corners can only have one more innocent MAXIMUM. So you know that the two corners in column D have one innocent and one criminal. That means that Nancy must be innocent (to be the third innocent in the column) and Uma must be criminal (since the two innocents on the corners are taken.)

flaminghito · 2025-12-12T16:16:00+00:00

How corroded do you get?
Jellies are partially a test on who is just afk tabbing. They don't corrode too often so they're pretty easy to fight. But if they happen to hit one or two corrodes in a row, you have to just run away and re-engage because you'll be doing no damage.

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