Minesweeper

What Minesweeper is like to play

Minesweeper is a counting puzzle wearing the costume of a game of nerve. The board here is 9 cells across and 9 down, 81 squares in total, and 10 of those squares hide a mine. Uncover all 71 safe squares and you win. Uncover a mine and the round ends at once.

Every number you reveal counts the mines touching that square, including diagonals, so a square can show anything from 1 to 8. A square with no mines nearby shows nothing and opens its neighbours automatically, which is why one good click can clear a quarter of the board. Your first click is always safe: the mines are placed after it, around wherever you tapped. That means the opening move is free and the guessing starts later, if at all.

Right-click, or switch on Flag mode on a touchscreen, to mark a square you believe hides a mine. The counter above the board tracks how many flags you have placed against the 10 mines. Flags are notes to yourself, not proof. Most boards are cracked by comparing two clues that share covered squares, which is the whole subject of the Minesweeper pattern guide. If you like deduction with no clock, Sudoku asks the same kind of question in a different language.

Minesweeper at a glance

Where Minesweeper came from

The idea predates Windows. Mainframe games such as Cube in 1973 and Jerimac Ratliff's Hurkle already asked players to find hidden objects on a grid from numeric hints. The direct ancestor is Mined-Out, written by Ian Andrew and published by Quicksilva for the ZX Spectrum in 1983, followed by Relentless Logic on MS-DOS in 1985.

The version everyone remembers was written by Robert Donner and Curt Johnson at Microsoft and shipped with the Microsoft Entertainment Pack in 1990, then bundled with Windows 3.1 in 1992. That bundling is the whole story of its fame. The game was on hundreds of millions of office computers by default, next to Solitaire, and it quietly taught a generation to use the right mouse button.

Competitive play grew up around the three standard boards: beginner at 9 by 9 with 10 mines, intermediate at 16 by 16 with 40, and expert at 30 by 16 with 99. Our board matches the beginner size. Other classic desktop puzzles live in the puzzle collection.

Ways people play Minesweeper

Intermediate and expert boards

The traditional step up is 16 by 16 with 40 mines, then 30 by 16 with 99. The mine density barely changes; what changes is how many separate deductions you must finish before the board is clear.

No-guess Minesweeper

The generator rejects any board that would ever force a coin flip. Every square becomes provable, which turns the game into pure logic and removes the unlucky loss on the final two squares.

Hexagonal and triangular grids

Change the tiling and each cell has a different neighbour count: six on hex boards instead of eight. Familiar number patterns stop working and you have to relearn what a 3 means.

Multi-mine and wrap-around boards

Some editions let a single square hold more than one mine, so clues count mines rather than squares. Others join the left and right edges, which removes the safe corners good players rely on.

If you like Minesweeper, try these next

Four games from the same shelf, each with its own pace. The one-line summaries are how their own pages describe them.