Minesweeper where luck never decides: mines are placed as you play, guessing only works when no tile can be proven safe. Three phone-sized boards.
What is Minesweeper?
Minesweeper is a single-player logic game played on a grid of covered tiles, where you open every tile that does not hide a mine, using the numbers on opened tiles to work out where the mines are. Each number tells you how many mines touch that tile, counting all eight neighbours, including diagonals.
In the classic game, mines are placed at random before you start, so many boards end with a forced 50-50 guess. Our Minesweeper removes that luck. Mines are decided as you play, and the rules guarantee that careful reading of the numbers is always enough.
How to play Minesweeper
Opening tiles: tap a tile to open it. Your first tap is always safe. A tile with no mines around it opens as a blank, and all its neighbours open automatically, which is why the first tap often clears a whole patch. A number on an opened tile counts the mines in the up to eight tiles around it.
Flags: when you are sure a tile hides a mine, mark it with a flag by long-pressing it, right-clicking it, or switching the tap action to Flag. Marking the same tile again changes the flag to a question mark, and once more clears it. The counter at the top shows how many mines are left after your flags.
Opening around a number: when a number already has as many flags around it as its value, tap it (or middle-click it) to open all its other neighbours at once. This is fast, but a wrong flag will open a mine.
Winning and losing: you win when every tile without a mine is open. You do not need to flag the mines. Opening a mine ends the game, but here you can press Undo to take back that last move and keep going.
The fair rule: mines are not placed in advance. Each time you open a tile, the game picks the worst layout for you that still fits every number you can see. So while any tile can be proven safe, opening a tile that might be a mine will always hit one. When no tile can be proven safe, a guess is safe as long as you pick a tile next to the open area.
Minesweeper strategy and patterns
Two basic rules solve most tiles. If a number has exactly as many covered neighbours as its value, all of them are mines. If a number already has its full count of flagged mines, every other neighbour is safe.
Subtract shared tiles. When two numbers sit side by side, they share some neighbours. Compare what each one sees: whatever is left over on one side after removing the shared tiles must hold the difference between the two numbers. Most named patterns are this idea applied to a straight edge.
The 1-1 from a wall: along a straight edge of covered tiles, if the row of numbers starts with a 1 against a wall or an opened corner, the first 1 sees only two covered tiles. The second 1 sees those two plus one more. The mine for the first 1 also serves the second, so that third tile is safe.
The 1-2 pattern: if a 1 and a 2 sit next to each other on a straight edge and everything the 1 sees is also seen by the 2, the 2 has one extra tile, and that tile is a mine.
The 1-2-1 pattern: on a straight edge, the tiles under both 1s are mines and the tile under the 2 is safe. The 1-2-2-1 pattern: the tiles under the two 2s are mines and the tiles under the two 1s are safe. These two come up constantly once you start looking.
Use the mine counter at the end. When only a few covered tiles are left, the number of mines remaining can decide between two possible layouts.
In this version, never guess while a safe tile exists. If you think you are stuck, press Hint: it tells you that a safe tile exists somewhere, that one of your flags could be wrong, or that you may now guess next to the open area. If every tile next to the open area is a mine, it tells you to play elsewhere.
Difficulty levels and variants
Our Minesweeper has three sizes, chosen to fit a phone screen: Easy is 7 by 9 tiles with 10 mines, Medium 8 by 12 with 18 mines, and Hard 9 by 14 with 28 mines. The board turns to match a portrait or landscape screen when a game starts. For comparison, the classic desktop levels were 9 by 9 with 10 mines, 16 by 16 with 40, and 16 by 30 with 99.
Other variants exist, including boards that are generated in advance to need no guessing, hexagonal grids, and custom sizes. The adaptive rule used here comes from an open-source variant described by its author as cruel but fair.
History of Minesweeper
Mine-hunting puzzles on a grid existed on computers before 1990, but Minesweeper became widely known in the early 1990s, when it came preinstalled on personal computers along with the three classic difficulty levels. It has also drawn attention from mathematicians: in 2000 Richard Kaye showed that deciding whether a Minesweeper position is consistent is an NP-complete problem, one of the hardest classes of problems computers can check quickly.
Playing Minesweeper on Hevagames
Minesweeper on Hevagames runs in the browser on phones and computers, with nothing to download. On touch screens, tap to open and long-press to flag, or use the Reveal and Flag switch if long presses are awkward. With a mouse, left-click opens, right-click flags and middle-click opens around a number. On a keyboard, the arrow keys move, Enter or Space opens, and F or ? places a flag.
The top bar shows mines left, the time and your best time for the current difficulty. The Hint button and Undo after a mine help you learn the patterns without restarting. Your game is saved if you leave, and the board, drawn with flat tiles in our own colours, fits the screen in light or dark theme.
How to play
- 1Open every tile that has no mine. A number tells how many mines touch that tile.
- 2Mines are not placed in advance. If some tile can be proven safe and you open a different, unproven one, it is a mine.
- 3If no tile can be proven safe, any guess next to the open area is safe.
- 4Mark mines with flags. Tapping a number whose mines are all flagged opens its other neighbours.
- 5Pick Easy (7×9, 10 mines), Medium (8×12, 18 mines) or Hard (9×14, 28 mines). The board turns to fit portrait or landscape screens.
Controls
Tips
- Use Hint: it tells you whether a safe tile exists, whether you may guess, or whether a flag is wrong.
- After hitting a mine, Undo takes back the last move so you can keep going.
- Guessing far from the open area is never safe here.