Minesweeper

Minesweeper is a deduction game dressed as a grid of squares. Each number tells you exactly how many mines touch it, and from enough numbers you can prove where every mine is without ever taking a risk.

Your first click is always safe — mines are laid afterwards, avoiding the square you clicked and everything around it.

How to play

1. Click any square to begin. The first click opens a region.
2. A number means that many mines touch that square, counting diagonals.
3. Right-click, long-press, or use flag mode to mark a square you have proved holds a mine.
4. Open every square that is not a mine to win.

Reading the board

Most of Minesweeper is two rules applied repeatedly:

• If a number equals the count of unopened squares around it, every one of those squares is a mine.
• If a number equals the count of flags around it, every other neighbour is safe.

Everything else is pattern recognition built on top. The 1-2-1 along a wall always puts mines beneath the ones. The 1-1 running away from a wall makes the third square safe. Learning six or seven of these turns a slow arithmetic exercise into something you can play at speed.

Chording is the whole speed game

Once a number has the correct number of flags around it, clicking that number opens everything else it touches. Players who chord clear an expert board in a fraction of the time of players who open squares individually, and the risk is identical — you are only ever acting on information you have already proved.

When you have to guess

Sometimes the remaining squares are genuinely ambiguous, and no amount of staring will help. When that happens, prefer corners and edges: they touch fewer squares, so a wrong guess costs you less information and a right one narrows the board more.

Each difficulty keeps its own best time, and the timer only starts on your first click.

Tips

• Learn the 1-2-1 pattern along an edge — the mines are always under the two ones. Recognising a handful of patterns like this replaces most of the arithmetic.
• When a number already has all its mines flagged, click it. Chording opens every remaining neighbour at once and is the single biggest speed gain available.
• Work the borders of opened regions rather than poking at fresh squares. Information only exists next to numbers, so anywhere else is a guess.
• When you genuinely must guess, guess in a corner or along an edge. Those squares have fewer neighbours, so a wrong guess reveals less and a right one constrains more.