Minesweeper

The board, and how you win

Each square either hides a mine or does not. When you open a square it shows how many mines sit in the eight squares around it; a square with none shows nothing at all and opens its neighbours automatically.

You win the moment every square without a mine is open. Flags are a tool for you — how many you placed, and where, has no effect on winning.

• Opening a mine ends that board. That is what Minesweeper is, not a punishment — and you can retry the same board immediately, for free, as many times as you like.

The first tap, and the no-guess promise

This is the central design decision of this Minesweeper.

Mines are placed after your first tap, and never on that square or the eight around it. So the first tap always opens an area rather than ending the game.

Then the board is checked: starting from what your first tap revealed, a solver tries to finish it using only the numbers on screen. A layout it cannot finish is thrown away and rebuilt.

Losing to luck betrays the player’s skill. The promise here is simple: play correctly and you will win. That is why an Undo would empty the game out — see below.

Controls

• Tap to open a square.
• Long press to place or remove a flag.
• Flag mode swaps the two, so you can play one-handed or without long pressing at all.
• Chording: tap an already-open number and, if it already has that many flags around it, every remaining neighbour opens at once. If a flag was wrong you will open a mine — that is your judgement, so the game lets it happen.
• Opening a square with no neighbouring mines opens the whole connected empty area and its border.

Difficulty, and what is counted

• The classic Hard board is 16×30. Thirty squares across a phone makes each one too small to tap reliably, so the difficulty comes from mine density instead of a grid you cannot hit.
• The remaining mine count (total mines minus flags placed) is shown. It is information from the board, not a countdown, and it can go negative if you over-flag.
• No clock is shown while you play. Your time is recorded and appears on the result screen and in statistics.
• There are no levels 1–999 here. Minesweeper has no natural progression, and inventing 999 steps would be padding.
• The Daily board is one per day, always Medium. Past days can be played, finished days are recorded, and no streak is counted.

Hint, and why there is no Undo

• Hint is unlimited and free. It points at one square that is provably safe from the numbers already on the board, and highlights the numbers that prove it. It never opens the square for you.
• A hint never points at a mine. Working out where the mines are is the game; being told would take that away.
• There is no Undo. Because every board is guaranteed solvable without guessing, opening a mine is always the result of a decision — and a decision you can take back is not a decision. Instead, the same board is always there to retry, instantly and for free.

Sudoku has both Undo and Hint, Sliding Puzzle has only Undo, and Minesweeper has only Hint. The shared rule is that every game gets free, unlimited help in a form that does not hollow it out — not that every game gets the same two buttons.

Tips

• Start from the edges of the opened area, where numbers have the fewest unknown neighbours.
• The basic pair of rules gets you a long way: if a number already touches that many flags, every other neighbour is safe; if a number equals its count of unopened neighbours, they are all mines.
• Learn the 1-2 pattern along a wall. Two adjacent numbers whose unknown squares overlap tell you about the squares that are not shared — that is the subset rule, and it is the second of the two rules every board here is guaranteed to yield to.
• Flag only when it helps you think or lets you chord. Flags do not score anything.
• If you are stuck, take a Hint before you take a risk. There is no cost, and by design there is always a safe square to find.

Questions people ask