> But actually they did worse since they needed a hint or 4.

Hmm, that is interesting, I had not thought about that. I will see if it makes more sense to reverse the axis. Might just make it more confusing though

> How do you curate the puzzle each day? Can you easily automate a bunch of puzzles then hand select them so back to back days aren't too similar? Or is it manual?

It's mostly manual, but I have some tools to quickly create map layouts and fill them with various distributions. Just to speed up testing out new levels.