Minesweeper Board (2024)

FAQs

How do you play Minesweeper? ›

Minesweeper is a game where mines are hidden in a grid of squares. Safe squares have numbers telling you how many mines touch the square. You can use the number clues to solve the game by opening all of the safe squares. If you click on a mine you lose the game!

Usually, a good starting strategy would be to choose a corner square. Each number on the board represents the maximum possible number of mines or bombs adjacent to the square with the number on it. Choosing an empty square, the game automatically unlocked all the squares with numbers around the empty ones.

Beginner is usually on an 8x8 or 9x9 board containing 10 mines, Intermediate is usually on a 16x16 board with 40 mines and expert is usually on a 30x16 board with 99 mines; however, there is usually an option to customise board size and mine count.

- Clicking both the left and right mouse buttons simultaneously over a number that already has it's mine(s) found, will open all the blocks around it. This can save time. So, once you find all the mines around that number, click the right and left mouse buttons simultaneously.

Minesweeper is single-player logic-based computer game played on rectangular board whose object is to locate a predetermined number of randomly-placed "mines" in the shortest possible time by clicking on "safe" squares while avoiding the squares with mines.

Right-click any squares that you think contain mines.

It's best to start with squares that absolutely have to contain mines (e.g., a solitary square next to a "1" on the board) to help with the process of elimination later. Make sure that you don't flag more squares than the number of mines on the board.

The puzzle contains numbered squares and empty squares in the grid. The numbers indicate how many mines are located in adjacent empty squares, including diagonally-touching squares. You must locate the position of every one of these mines in the grid and mark them accordingly.

If there are 1 or 3 mines no guessing is needed. You cannot deduce the mines. The third strategy forgets about mines and opens the safe pink squares. If each pink square is a 1 the blue squares can also be opened.

Reveal Mines

With your cursor inside the minesweeper window type "XYZZY" then press Shift-Enter and Enter. A white dot should appear in the upper-left corner of the screen. If it turns black, your cursor is resting on a mine.

The goal of Minesweeper is to uncover all the squares on a grid that do not contain mines without being "blown up" by clicking on a square with a mine underneath. The location of most mines is discovered through a logical process, but some require guessing, usually with a 50-50 chance of being correct.

What is the pattern to Minesweeper? ›

Minesweeper Patterns

The two most famous patterns are 1-2-1 and 1-2-2-1. You should memorise these immediately. The 1-2-1 pattern has one solution. The 1-2-2-1 pattern has one solution.

Backtracking algorithm is used in Minesweeper to recursively find all possible solutions of the cells that satisfy the constraint (Number of mines adjacent to cells must be equal). The first case is the original Minesweeper game, and it is a lot more complex than the second one.

Again, referring to Robert Kaye, Minesweeper is a NP-complete problem. The definition of a NP-complete problem is that all other NP problems can be reduced to using polynomial-time many one deduction.

The purpose of the game is to open all the cells of the board which do not contain a bomb. You lose if you set off a bomb cell. Every non-bomb cell you open will tell you the total number of bombs in the eight neighboring cells.

The numbers on the board represent how many bombs are adjacent to a square. For example, if a square has a "3" on it, then there are 3 bombs next to that square. The bombs could be above, below, right-left, or diagonal to the square. Avoid all the bombs and expose all the empty spaces to win Minesweeper.

A sweep is either a contact sweep, a wire dragged through the water by one or two ships to cut the mooring wire of floating mines, or a distance sweep that mimics a ship to detonate the mines. The sweeps are dragged by minesweepers, either purpose-built military ships or converted trawlers.

The goal of Minesweeper is to uncover all the squares on a grid that do not contain mines without being "blown up" by clicking on a square with a mine underneath. The location of most mines is discovered through a logical process, but some require guessing, usually with a 50-50 chance of being correct.