Mine Sweeper

Mine Sweeper is a classic, single-player, puzzle game. Your goal is to clear the mine field without stepping on a mine. To win, you must uncover all the squares that do not contain a hidden mine without uncovering any square that does contain a hidden mine.

If you’ve never played Mine Sweeper before, this help will provide you with the basics. We’ve divided this into three sections, which are best read sequentially.

1. How to Play Mine Sweeper
2. Example Game
3. Pro Tips

Once you know how to play, and have understood the basics, the best way to learn is to play and have fun discovering the patterns.

How to Play Mine Sweeper

To uncover a square, touch or click on one of the blue squares. At the start, you don’t have any clues, so you’ll have to guess. Simply touch or click on a square at random. Uncovering a square will either reveal a mine, a number or an empty square:

If you’re unlucky and you uncover a square with a mine, it explodes and it’s game over. Don’t worry, this will happen sometimes. Simply try again by either clicking “Restart” or “New Game”. Clicking “Restart” will give you the exact same minefield and layout. You have seen where all the mines are, but can you remember? Clicking “New Game” will give you a completely new minefield with new random locations for all the mines.

If you uncover a number, you are given a clue. The number indicates how many of the surrounding eight squares contain a hidden mine. At first, this clue may not help you very much. You can either be strategic and work from the recently uncovered squares outwards, or keep touching or clicking on random squares until you uncover an empty square.

If you’re lucky, you will uncover an empty square. An empty square indicates that none of the surrounding eight squares contain a hidden mine. Since it’s safe to uncover all of the surrounding squares, the game will automatically do this for you. Now it’s time for you to use logic to discover where the mines are.

Place a flag on squares that you think contain a hidden mine. A flag is a reminder of which covered squares contain hidden mines. A flag also prevents you from accidentally touching or clicking on a square that contains a hidden mine. To place a flag, touch and hold for two seconds, or long-click on the square that you think contains a hidden mine. You will see a flag zooming in to confirm the flag is set.

Flagged: You think this square contains a hidden mine

Now continue to clear the remaining, safe, covered squares. If the number in a field equals the number of surrounding squares on which you’ve placed flags, you know that the remaining, surrounding, covered squares do not contain hidden mines. Therefore, they are safe, and you can confidently touch or click on the remaining, surrounding covered squares.

Learn from your mistakes. If you accidentally uncover a square with a hidden mine, it will explode and the game is over. To help you learn where you went wrong, the game will reveal the location of all the remaining, hidden, covered mines, where flags were correctly placed, and where flags were incorrectly placed.

Try again. With time, you will learn to recognise patterns. Soon you will be clicking on squares with confidence and clearing minefields in record time.

Example Game

In this example, we started by touching or clicking the top-left most square.

We were lucky, it didn’t contain a hidden mine. Even better, none of it’s neighbours contain a hidden mine either. Therefore the game automatically uncovered those squares for us too. This left us with six cleared squares.

Let’s use logic to discover the location of our first two mines. The green 2 at the top indicates that two of the surrounding squares contain mines. However, only two of its neighbours remain covered. Therefore, we know that those two squares contain mines. Let’s mark them with flags by long-clicking or touch and holding for two seconds.

Now look at the green 2 below the top one. It also has two neighbours containing hidden mines, but we already know which two those are: the ones we’ve placed flags on. Therefore, we can safely clear the remaining squares surrounding the lower green 2.

We’re already making good progress. Give it a try, and then look at the Pro Tips for further advice.

Pro Tips

1. Start with the 1’s on corners. 1’s on corners are easy to spot. They have all the squares except for one uncovered. The remaining covered one must contain a hidden mine. Place a flag on it.
2. Once you’ve flagged all a square’s hidden mines, you can quickly clear the remaining squares by clicking on the uncovered square. The game will automatically uncover all the remaining, surrounding, covered squares for you. In the Example Game, clicking on the circled 1’s with one neighbouring, flagged square, quickly clears the remaining, surrounding, covered squares.

3. Next, look at the squares bordering on the edges of the minefield. Squares bordering the edges of the minefield only have 5 – or even 3 in the case of corner squares – neighbouring squares. This reduces the number of squares we need to consider when placing flags. In the Example Game, we used the green 2 on the edge of the minefield to set our first two flags.
4. If you need to remove a flag, because you’ve changed your mind about it containing a hidden mine, touch and hold for two seconds, or long-click on the square that contains a flag. You will see a flag zooming out to confirm the flag has been removed.
5. Placing flags correctly also tells you how many hidden mines remain to be found. Towards the end of the game, knowing how many mines remain can help you solve the location of the last few hidden mines, because sometimes different possibilities require different numbers of mines.
6. Even if you uncover an empty square, and even if you’ve cleared most of the field, there will be times when the number clues won’t be enough to discover which covered squares contain a hidden mine. Not all mine fields are winnable using logic; especially if you use a “Custom” size and increase the number of mines in the field.

Good luck and enjoy the game!