Minesweeper looks like a game of luck and is not one. Every number you uncover is a small, complete statement about the eight cells touching it, and almost every position falls apart the moment you set two of those statements beside each other. The grid does not move. Nothing is chasing you. The gap between the board you have and the cleared board you want is arithmetic, and it is arithmetic you can do in your head.

That is why it has outlasted the machines it came on. A loss is never bad luck done to you — it is either a cell you had the information to read and didn't, or a coin flip you walked into early, and after a hundred boards you tell those apart instantly. An easy grid is ninety seconds of tidy deduction; a hard one is twenty minutes of work with a moment near the end where the whole thing suddenly resolves.

Where it comes from

Hidden-mine grids are older than Windows by a couple of decades: they ran on mainframes in the 1970s, and Mined-Out walked you across a minefield on a ZX Spectrum in 1983. The idea — count what is adjacent, deduce the rest — belonged to nobody then and belongs to nobody now.

The version the world learned arrived in a Microsoft entertainment pack in 1990 and then travelled on Windows 3.1, where it sat quietly doing a second job: teaching people to use a mouse. Solitaire taught you to drag things. This taught you that the pointer had a second button and that pressing it meant something different — millions of people first right-clicked anything, ever, to plant a flag on a suspected mine.

What this version does with it

The rules are the standard ones, with the two modern courtesies that make a phone version bearable. Mines are not dealt until after your opening tap, and then they are dealt around it, so the first move always opens a region instead of stranding you on a lone number. And a number whose flags are all placed can be tapped to clear everything else it touches at once, which is where the speed in this game lives — it trusts your flags exactly as far as you do.

The expert board is the interesting piece of work. Thirty by sixteen is unreadable held upright, so it is turned on its side: sixteen columns, thirty rows, the same four hundred and eighty cells and the same ninety-nine mines, now fitting a phone screen whole with nothing to scroll. Difficulty was not softened to make it fit. Best times are kept per board on your device, the clock does not start until your first tap, and a board you abandon is still there tomorrow.

Thirty seconds to start

• Tap to open. To flag, hold a cell down for roughly half a second — that one gesture is most of the game on a phone.
• Prefer not to hold? The top bar has a flag toggle that switches plain taps over to flagging.
• On a keyboard: arrows move, Space opens, X flags, N deals a new board.

Where the information actually is

Only one part of the board is ever telling you anything: the seam where the opened region meets the covered one. The middle of an untouched field holds no information at all, so time spent staring at it is time wasted. Work the seam, and when a cell resists, stop solving numbers one at a time and compare two that overlap — the difference between a pair of neighbouring numbers names a mine far more often than either of them does alone. Guess last, guess at an edge, and count the mines you have left before you decide that a position is a guess at all.

Read the full Minesweeper guide  →

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