Clues by Sam vs Murdle vs EveryClue (2026 Comparison)
If you’ve solved one daily whodunit, you’re probably looking for the next one. Here’s an honest read on the three most-talked-about web games in the category right now — and the trade-offs between them.
At a glance
| Clues by Sam | Murdle | EveryClue | |
|---|---|---|---|
| First published | 2022 | 2022 | 2026 |
| Format | 5×4 logic grid | 5×4 zebra grid + book series | 5×4 grid + lateral mystery |
| Daily cadence | Yes | Yes (web archive paywalled) | Yes |
| Languages | English | English (books in 22) | English + 7 more, day one |
| Free archive | Last 7 days | Last 3 days | Last 7 days |
| Mistake counter | No | Yes (3 strikes, you’re out) | Yes |
| AI host / lateral puzzle | No | No | Yes |
| Subscription tier | None | None | Sleuth+ ($4.99/mo, full archive) |
| Best for | A 90-second morning ritual | A 10-minute “I want to think hard” puzzle | Both — and players who don’t read English first |
What Clues by Sam does best
The interface. There is nothing to learn. Five rows, four columns, click to mark, hover to read the clue. The puzzle is gone in 90 seconds if you’re a regular. That’s the whole product, and the whole product is well-built. The community lives in r/CluesBySamHelp, which is mostly people sharing their times and occasionally complaining about “Sunday Evil”, a single weekly difficulty spike that exists, in our humble opinion, mainly because the rest of the week is borderline too easy.
What it doesn’t do: scale beyond English, give you any way to play yesterday’s puzzle if you missed it past day seven, or offer anything except the grid.
What Murdle does best
Story. Murdle is the only one of the three that wraps the deduction in a full noir narrative — each puzzle has a victim, a coroner’s note, a backstory, and a publishing-house-grade illustration. It’s the puzzle to do when you want to feel like a detective, not just solve a logic grid. The trade-off: you’ll spend ten minutes per puzzle, not ninety seconds, and the on-ramp is steeper. The first time you see a Murdle, you’ll need the tutorial.
The author, G.T. Karber, has built a real publishing brand around it. There are now physical Murdle books in twenty-two languages, which is genuinely impressive for a daily web puzzle that started as a side project. The web version is the lossy preview of the book version.
What EveryClue does best
Languages and freshness. We publish a new grid and a new lateral mystery every day at 00:00 UTC, in eight languages — English, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, French, German, Korean, and Chinese — with cultural anchors tuned per locale instead of machine-translated. Japanese mysteries are set in Kyoto inns with Showa-era detectives; Spanish ones use Latin American names and hacienda settings; Chinese ones lean on Republican-era Shanghai. The clue vocabulary across all eight languages is hand-locked, not AI-translated, so the deduction reads native everywhere.
We also ship a lateral mystery every day alongside the grid — a yes/no story puzzle hosted by a locked-down AI that only ever answers “Yes”, “No”, or “Irrelevant”. It’s a completely different muscle from the grid and a perfect “I want to think but not hard” puzzle for the back end of the day.
Which one should you do?
If you have one daily logic puzzle slot in your morning routine:
- You want it fast and you read English. Clues by Sam. It’s purpose-built for that.
- You want it slow, you want story, you want a book on your nightstand. Murdle.
- You don’t read English first, or you want the lateral mystery + global leaderboard. EveryClue. (We may be biased.)
There’s no rule that says you can only do one. The grid takes maybe two minutes; the lateral takes maybe five; that’s seven minutes total. Less than your coffee.
Try today’s case
Today’s grid at EveryClue takes about three minutes. Today’s lateral mystery is about five. New cases at 00:00 UTC, free to play, in your language.