Minesweeper
puzzleHow to play Minesweeper
I click or tap a tile to uncover it. A number tells me how many of the eight neighboring tiles hide a mine, and empty tiles open up their neighbors automatically. The first tile I open is always safe.
To mark a suspected mine I right click on desktop, or I switch on Flag mode and tap on mobile. I win when every safe tile is uncovered, and I lose the moment I open a mine.
About Minesweeper
Minesweeper is the accidental legend of office computing. Microsoft included it with Windows 3.1 in 1992, officially to teach people right-clicking, and in doing so put a genuinely deep logic puzzle on hundreds of millions of desktops. Robert Donner's version popularized rules that had been evolving in games like Mined-Out since the early 1980s.
Every number is a fact: it counts the mines in the eight cells around it, no more, no less. A board position is a system of simultaneous constraints, and solving one is closer to Sudoku than to gambling. Only when logic is genuinely exhausted does probability enter, and knowing the difference between a deduction and a guess is the whole discipline.
Minesweeper logic patterns
- Learn the 1-2-1 pattern along a wall: the mines sit under the 1s' outer cells, and the cell under the 2 is safe.
- Learn 1-2-2-1: the mines are under the two middle 2s, and both cells under the 1s are safe.
- A number touching exactly as many unopened cells as its value means all of them are mines, flag and move on.
- A number already touching its full count of flags means every other neighbor is safe, chord them open.
- When forced to guess, prefer the cell with the lowest local mine probability, and accept that some boards just end you.
FAQ
What do the numbers in Minesweeper actually mean?
Each number counts the mines in its up-to-eight surrounding cells, that is the game's only rule. Everything else, patterns, flags, chords, is technique built on cross-referencing those counts against each other.
Can Minesweeper always be solved without guessing?
No. Classic boards can produce positions where several mine arrangements fit every visible number, and a guess is mathematically forced, the notorious 50/50s. Good play defers those guesses to the end, when other information sometimes resolves them.
Is the first click ever a mine?
In the classic Windows rules the first click is always safe, the board shuffles a mine away if you would have hit one, and most modern versions honor that convention. First-click safety is why opening in the middle of the board is standard.
What is chording?
Clicking a revealed number that already has all its flags placed, which opens every remaining neighbor at once. It is faster than clicking cells one by one and is the backbone of speed play, but a misplaced flag makes it fatal.
