Minesweeper

How to play

Somewhere under the grid, a set number of mines are hidden. Reveal a cell and it either is a mine — the game ends — or shows a number: how many mines sit in the up-to-eight cells touching it. A revealed cell showing nothing at all means none of its neighbors are mines either, and those neighbors open up automatically along with it, often clearing a whole section of the board in one click. You win by revealing every cell that isn't a mine.

Your very first click is always safe — mines aren't placed until after it, and never on the cell you clicked or the cells touching it. If you suspect a hidden cell is a mine, flag it: right-click on a desktop, or turn on flag mode below and tap on a touchscreen. A flagged cell can't be revealed by accident until you unflag it.

Reading the numbers

Each number tells you exactly how many of that cell's neighbors are mines — nothing more and nothing less. If a revealed 1 has only one still-hidden neighbor, that neighbor is a mine with certainty. If a revealed number already has that many neighbors flagged, every other hidden neighbor is certainly safe. Almost the entire game is this one piece of logic, applied over and over as more of the board opens up.

Board sizes

Beginner is a nine-by-nine board with ten mines — a couple of minutes, good for learning the basics. Intermediatesteps up to sixteen-by-sixteen with forty mines. Expert is the classic thirty-by-sixteen board with ninety-nine mines, and it plays a genuinely different game — there's more room for the kind of multi-cell deduction that separates a strong player from a lucky one.

Tips for a stronger game

Start in a corner or against an edge. An edge cell has fewer neighbors than one in the open middle of the board, which means fewer unknowns to juggle and an easier read on its number.

When you're genuinely stuck with no certain move left, the least-risky guess is usually a cell touching the fewest revealed numbers — the less information pointing at a cell, the less likely something you've already deduced rules it out as safe.