Minesweeper
The classic, with a guaranteed-safe first click, three board sizes, and flags on right-click or long-press — plus the logic patterns that solve most boards.
Click to reveal. Right-click, long-press, or hold Shift and click to flag. Your first click is always safe — and so are the eight cells around it.
The first click is never a mine
The mines are placed after you click, and never in the cell you clicked or the eight around it. That is why a first click always opens a region rather than a lone number — a Minesweeper that can kill you on move one is a broken Minesweeper, and this one cannot.
You win by revealing every square that is not a mine. Flags are a note to yourself and the game does not check them, so a board flagged perfectly but not cleared is not a win.
Things worth knowing
- The mines are placed after your first click, never before, and never in the eight cells around it. That is why a first click always opens a region instead of a single number — a Minesweeper that can kill you on move one is a broken one.
- You win by revealing every square that is not a mine. Flags are a note to yourself and the game does not check them, so a board flagged perfectly but not cleared is not a win.
- A number counts the mines in the eight surrounding cells, and it is the only information there is. Everything else in the game is deduction from those numbers.
- The most useful pattern is a 1 with exactly one hidden neighbour — that neighbour is a mine. The second is a number whose mines are all flagged, which makes every other neighbour safe.
- The 1-2-1 pattern along a wall is always mine-safe-mine, and recognising it saves more time than any amount of careful counting.
How to use
- Click any square to start — the first click is always safe.
- Use the numbers to deduce where mines are.
- Right-click or long-press to flag a mine.
- Learn the common patterns rather than guessing.
Frequently asked questions
What does each number mean?
How many mines touch that square, counting all eight neighbours including diagonals. Everything in the game follows from that single rule, and the whole of Minesweeper strategy is deduction from overlapping counts.
Is the first click always safe?
Here, yes. The board is generated after your first click so that square is never a mine, which is the modern convention. The original Windows version did not do this at first, and losing on the opening move was a genuinely common and irritating experience.
What is the 1-2-1 pattern?
A row reading 1, 2, 1 along a wall of covered squares, where the mines must sit under the two 1s and the middle is safe. Along with the 1-2-2-1 pattern, it resolves a large share of situations that look ambiguous, and learning a handful of these patterns improves play more than anything else.
Can every board be solved without guessing?
Not always. Some positions genuinely require a coin-flip, particularly in corners and at the end of a board, and no amount of skill resolves them. Some implementations generate guaranteed-solvable boards; most, including this one, do not, so a proportion of losses are simply bad luck.
What is the best opening strategy?
Click a corner or edge first, since those squares have fewer neighbours and so give more constrained information. Then expand from the largest opened region rather than poking at isolated squares — working from an area with several numbers gives far more to deduce from.
Where did the game come from?
It descends from mainframe games of the 1970s and 80s and reached a vast audience bundled with Windows from 1990. It was included partly to teach people to use a mouse — right-clicking in particular — which is why an entire generation learned precise clicking from a logic puzzle.
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