Guide · Minesweeper

How to play Minesweeper properly

Almost everyone who says they hate Minesweeper is playing it as a game of luck. It isn’t. On a well-made board, nearly every move is forced by information already on the screen — you just have to know how to read it. This guide covers the two rules that solve most boards, the handful of patterns worth memorising, and what to do in the rare position where you really must guess.

The rules, in sixty seconds

The grid hides a fixed number of mines. Tap a covered square to uncover it. If it holds a mine, the game is over. If it doesn’t, you get a number: how many mines touch that square, counting all eight neighbours, diagonals included. An empty square means zero mines touch it, so the game opens up its neighbours for you automatically, which is why one tap can clear half a board. You win when every square that isn’t a mine is uncovered. Flags are just your own notes — they mark where you believe a mine sits, and they never affect the board itself.

One detail matters more than people expect: the first tap is always safe. In our game, the mines are not placed until after you tap, and they avoid your square and everything touching it. That is why the first tap tends to open a large area rather than a lone number.

The two rules that solve most boards

Every deduction in Minesweeper, however clever it looks, is built from two observations about a single number and the covered squares around it.

Rule one: when the flags add up, the rest are safe

If a number already has as many mines found around it as its own value, every other covered square touching it is safe. A 1 with one mine found next to it is finished talking — its remaining neighbours can be opened without risk.

Rule two: when the count matches the space, they are all mines

If a number equals the count of covered squares around it, every one of those squares is a mine. A 3 with exactly three covered neighbours has told you where all three are.

Most boards are solved by applying these two rules over and over, each answer feeding the next. When you get stuck, it is almost never because the board is unfair. It is because you are looking at one number at a time.

Read numbers in pairs, not one by one

The real skill is comparing two numbers that share covered squares. Subtract what they have in common and the difference tells you something neither could tell you alone.

Its longer cousin, 1-2-2-1, resolves the opposite way: the mines sit under the twos and the squares under the ones are safe. These two shapes turn up constantly along the edges of an open area, and recognising them on sight is most of what separates a fast player from a slow one.

Where to tap first

Open in a corner or along an edge. Edge squares touch five neighbours instead of eight and corners only three, so the numbers you get back are constrained by the wall and far easier to reason about. Starting in the middle of a large board gives you an 8-way number with nothing to anchor it.

After the opening, always work the frontier — the boundary between opened and covered squares — rather than hunting around the board at random. Exhaust one section completely before moving on. Deductions chain, and leaving a half-read section behind is how solvable boards start to feel unsolvable.

When you genuinely must guess

Sometimes no deduction exists and a guess is the only move. Three things improve the odds.

• Use the mine counter. Near the end, the mines remaining divided by the covered squares remaining is a real probability. If four mines remain across twelve covered squares, a random square is a mine one time in three — but a specific square next to a satisfied 1 may be far safer than that.
• Prefer squares with fewer constraints. A covered square in a large untouched region is usually safer than one wedged into a numbered frontier, because the frontier squares are where the known mines have to live.
• Guess early rather than late. A guess taken while most of the board is still covered costs you little if it is wrong. The same guess at the end throws away a solved board.

Flags: useful, but not everywhere

Flags exist to support rule one. Place them where they let you clear neighbours immediately, and skip them where they only slow you down. Many quick players flag almost nothing on easy boards and flag heavily on dense ones, where keeping track of found mines in your head stops being realistic. In our game you plant a flag by long-pressing a square, or by switching to flag mode if you prefer tapping.

A practice plan that works

Mine density, not board size, decides how hard a game feels. These are the four boards in our version of the game:

Stay on one board until you win it consistently without guessing, then move up. Jumping to the hardest board early teaches you to gamble, which is the one habit that will keep you losing. If you want a fixed daily test of the same skill, the daily challenge rotates through Beginner, Medium and Hard, and holding a streak on it is a fair measure of real progress.