Minesweeper

How to play Minesweeper

Minesweeper is a classic logic puzzle. Hidden under the grid are a fixed number of mines. Your goal is to reveal every cell that does not contain a mine — without clicking on any mine — as fast as you can.

Controls

• Left-click / tap — reveal a cell.
• Right-click (desktop) or long-press (mobile, hold for ~0.4s) — place or remove a flag on a suspected mine.
• Smiley face button — start a fresh game on the current difficulty.
• Level dropdown — switch difficulty. Changing difficulty starts a new game.

Reading the board

• A revealed cell with a number tells you how many mines are hidden in the 8 cells around it.
• A revealed cell with no number has no mines next to it. When you click such a cell the game automatically opens its empty neighbours and reveals a connected area at once.
• A flagged cell (⚑) cannot be opened by accident. Flag cells you’re sure are mines so you don’t click them later.
• The 💣 counter shows mines remaining (total mines minus flags placed). It does not tell you whether your flags are correct.
• The ⏱ timer starts on your first click and stops when you win or lose. Your time is your score — lower is better.

Difficulty levels

• Easy — 9 × 9 board, 10 mines. About 12% of the cells are mines. Good for warming up and learning the patterns.
• Medium — 16 × 16 board, 40 mines (~16% mine density). The classic Minesweeper challenge.
• Hard — 16 × 30 board, 99 mines (~21% mine density). For experts. Expect to need to guess in tight spots.

Strategy tips

• Your first click is always safe. The mines are placed only after you click, and never inside the 3×3 area around your first click. So start anywhere — the middle is usually best because it tends to open a larger area.
• Look for forced numbers. If a “1” touches only one unrevealed cell, that cell must be the mine. Flag it.
• Use satisfied numbers. If a “2” already has 2 flags around it, every other neighbour is safe — click them.
• Work the borders. Numbers on the edges and corners of revealed regions are easiest to reason about because they have fewer hidden neighbours.
• Don’t guess until you have to. Always look for forced moves first. When you do have to guess, prefer cells next to a low number rather than a high one.

Winning and losing

You win when every cell that is not a mine has been revealed. You don’t need to flag every mine — flags are just a memory aid.

You lose if you click on any mine. The board reveals all mines so you can see what happened. Click the smiley face to try again.

The story behind Minesweeper

Minesweeper feels like it has always existed, but the version most people remember arrived with Microsoft Windows. It shipped as part of the Microsoft Entertainment Pack in the early 1990s and was then bundled directly with Windows 3.1 in 1992, which put it on hundreds of millions of office computers overnight. For a whole generation it became the game you played in spare moments between spreadsheets — no install, no manual, just a grid of grey squares daring you to start clicking.

Behind the nostalgia sits a surprisingly deep puzzle. The board is a pure deduction problem: almost every safe move can be proven from the numbers already showing, and only occasionally are you forced to weigh probabilities and take a calculated risk. That mix of logic and nerve is why Minesweeper has kept a competitive speed-running community for decades, and why computer scientists still use it as a teaching example — determining whether a given Minesweeper position is even consistent is a famously hard (NP-complete) problem.

Reading the numbers like an expert

Improving at Minesweeper is mostly about recognising small patterns instead of solving each square from scratch. A few worth memorising:

• The 1-1 pattern. When two “1”s sit side by side along the edge of the unknown region, the cell just past them is usually safe. Train your eye to spot this — it opens huge areas quickly.
• The 1-2-1 pattern. A row reading 1-2-1 along a wall of hidden cells almost always means the mines are under the two “1”s, and the cell under the “2” is safe.
• Count, then subtract. If a number already touches as many flags as its value, every other neighbour is safe and can be opened immediately.
• Use the global mine count. Late in a game the 💣 counter plus the few remaining unknown cells often forces the answer even when local numbers are ambiguous.

Frequently asked questions

Offline play

Once this page has loaded, the whole game runs in your browser. You can keep playing even if you lose your internet connection. Your scores are stored on your device and uploaded to the leaderboard automatically the next time you reconnect (only if you’re logged in — guests play for fun and their scores stay local).