How to play minesweeper

How To Play Minesweeper

Games Mentioned in this Article.

Learning how to play Minesweeper is all about using your educated guesses. Everyone is familiar with a Minesweeper board. You’ve probably even clicked your mouse around the grid, without really giving it a thought.

Approaching a new Minesweeper board is a little daunting. When the board is blank, it can be a little unnerving when deciding what square to click first. Each square on the board hides either a number or a mine. To find out what is hidden behind each one, you must simply click on them.

The good news is: your first pick is essentially a free hit. It could come up blank or numbered, but it will never be a mine. It’s best to dive right into the middle of the board. Starting off with a square in a corner could lead you to be stuck early on. Once you reveal a number, it’s up to you to work out what mines might be in the adjacent squares around that number. If the number you reveal is a 2, you’ll need to flag two adjacent squares where you think mines are.

Minesweeper Tips

Stay vigilant. When you click a square and a number is revealed, you need to pay attention to the adjacent squares. If your square reveals a one, and it’s only touching a single uncleared square, then it simply must be a mine. The same can be said when the number is two or three. And while this is the very crux of the game, it can be something that is forgotten when you are scrambling around for the next square to click. You need to keep your head on a swivel because the board is bigger than you think.

Look for the patterns. This is the most important skill to pick up when learning how to play Minesweeper. The more you play the game, the more you’ll spot the patterns on the board. For example, if you have a row of squares numbered 1-2-1, with squares above and below this being clear. You know that you can go ahead and flag the two squares next to the ones, simply because there cannot be a mine next to the two as there would be no other place to play the mine. You can even extend out the numbers to 1-2-2-1 and it’s a similar rule. The more clicks on the board, the more patterns you’ll discover.

The Benefits of Playing Minesweeper

It might not seem like it, but there are some benefits to kicking back with a game of Minesweeper. It’s a game rooted in logic and problem solving, so as you progress in the game, you are improving your logic skills. You are learning how to plan ahead and consider the next moves to successfully complete your puzzle. This is a truly beneficial skill to tune and apply to so many other day-to-day situations.

Playing Minesweeper just also keeps your brain active and this is an important tool in maintaining memory function. Studies have found that cognitive training can improve some aspects of memory and thinking, particularly for people who are middle-aged or older. Playing games like Minesweeper also focuses the mind and helps players deal with stress and worry. By focusing the mind on a game like this, it can help bring a sense of calm when other areas of their life may be causing them strife.

Where to Play Minesweeper

The best thing about Minesweeper is that you can play it for free! It’s a game as old as computers themselves and no matter what seems to change, people still want to learn how to play Minesweeper. It’s a game for the ages.

How To Play Minesweeper

Minesweeper Rules

Minesweeper on Windows XP with 40 mines solved in 28 seconds

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!

Windows Minesweeper always makes the first click safe. You open squares with the left mouse button and put flags on mines with the right mouse button. Pressing the right mouse button again changes your flag into a questionmark. When you open a square that does not touch any mines, it will be empty and the adjacent squares will automatically open in all directions until reaching squares that contain numbers. A common strategy for starting games is to randomly click until you get a big opening with lots of numbers.

If you flag all of the mines touching a number, chording on the number opens the remaining squares. Chording is when you press both mouse buttons at the same time. This can save you a lot of work! However, if you place the correct number of flags on the wrong squares, chording will explode the mines.

The three difficulty levels are Beginner (8×8 or 9×9 with 10 mines), Intermediate (16×16 with 40 mines) and Expert (30×16 with 99 mines). The game ends when all safe squares have been opened. A counter shows the number of mines without flags, and a clock shows your time in seconds. Minesweeper saves your best time for each difficulty level.

You also can play Custom games up to 30×24 with a minimum of 10 mines and maximum of (x-1)(y-1) mines.

Basic Patterns

When a number touches the same number of squares, those squares must be mines. Look at these examples:

How to play Minesweeper like a pro

Kamil Murański currently holds four world records in Minesweeper: Expert (31.133 seconds), Intermediate (7.503 seconds), Expert nonflagging (35.152 seconds), and Intermediate nonflagging (8.19 seconds). You can find his replays on his YouTube channel.

Optimize your setup

Start with a good mouse and mousepad. Your mouse must provide solid control and accuracy. I’m using an old Logitech MX518 set to 800 dpi with the sensitivity at the third position in the Windows control panel and mouse acceleration turned off. Also, make sure your desk can’t shake, and position your chair at a good level—too high, and you’ll have a hard time grasping the mouse. Too low, and your hand will hurt.

When you’re ready, download a competitive Minesweeper app such as Minesweeper X. They prevent cheating, count time to hundredths of a second, and automatically record replays. Keep your hands warm, but if your hand starts to sweat while you’re playing, wash it (I wash mine every 10 to 15 minutes). It’s difficult to click accurately if your hand is perspiring.

Learn the patterns

Play Minesweeper long enough, and you’ll learn where the mines are just by looking at the pattern of numbers. For example, you’ll see the following combinations often.

Learning to read these patterns is like learning to read a language. At the beginning, it takes a lot of time to recognize every single letter, but after a few years you can read quickly, without any effort. It’s the same with learning patterns—after three years of playing Minesweeper a few hours a day, you don’t have to think about where the mines are when you see these patterns.

Use flags wisely

If you play using flags, employ the “double-click” technique (press the left and right mouse buttons at the same time). This action opens all squares surrounding a square with a number, if you have marked the number of mines around that number. In the example below, you mark a mine in a corner and then double-click on the circled 1 to open the surrounding four squares simultaneously. This approach is faster than opening four safe squares individually using the left-click.

Here is an example of ineffective flagging:

In this situation you have only one safe square, so you should open that square with a left-click instead of flagging the mine.

Don’t guess wildly

If you are forced to guess, always open a square with the least chance of hitting a mine.

In the situation shown above, the squares I’ve marked with a red dot present a 50 percent chance of losing, while the square with the green dot has only a 15.625 percent (Beginner and Intermediate) or 20.625 percent (Expert) chance to lose.

Join the club

Stop by Authoritative Minesweeper, the online home of the Minesweeper community. You can find information about world records, a Minesweeper wiki, live tournaments, and plenty of tips. To join the World Ranking, your time records on Beginner, Intermediate, and Expert must add to less than 100 seconds.

How To Play Minesweeper: 6 Tricks That Will Help You Win The Game

The minesweeper game is a one-player video game that can be played offline or online. This game will train you to make informed decisions by making calculated guesses and eliminating unlikely options. You go from known to unknown in the minesweeper game. So, how to play Minesweeper?

Your first click in the game gives you the first information, and it is the only known fact in the game. This click will not be a mine, and it will lead you to every other mine. Each correct click will give you a clue to another click. The minesweeper is a game of puzzles, only this time you are watching out for mines.

The chances are that you already have this game on your personal computer if you use the Windows operating system. It is a top-rated game with many variants developed for general use with different devices.

This article will explain the typical structure of the minesweeper you will get on a Windows operating system and other common platforms. It gives a comprehensive minesweeper guide that will help you learn how to play minesweeper as a beginner and teach you minesweeper strategies and tricks that will increase your chances of winning the game.

We would be giving you minesweeper tips and tricks to help you become an expert of the game. To understand the minesweeper strategy, you have to learn all about the game structure and how it is played. By the end of this article, you would have had enough information to make you a great player.

This article serves as a minesweeper guide, which will teach you the following:

What is Minesweeper? Quick Overview of the Game

Dated as far back as the 60s and 70s, the minesweeper game is one of the oldest played games in history. Though the game has seen several modifications from its ancient form, the essential gameplay remains intact with general minesweeper rules applying to all varieties of the game that has ever been.

The minesweeper game is a video game played by a single player. Like its name, it involves navigating through mines in a puzzle-like game.

By structure, you have a game board, rectangular, which contains hidden mines or bombs. The minesweeper rules dictate that you do not “detonate” any of these mines or bombs while playing.

It is a game that combines both luck and skill. Luck is involved in the composition of the game you get at the start of the game. You cannot decide what number of mines you will have at the beginning of the game or how they will be arranged.

The skill while learning how to play minesweeper involves knowing and mastering the minesweeper strategy and tips that teach you how to win minesweeper when you play.

Structure of the Game

In a typical minesweeper game, you get a board that is divided into cells. These cells could be covered, exposed, or flagged. These are called the states of the section.

There might be variations in the structure of the minesweeper game depending on what version you are playing. Despite these little changes you may get depending on the developer, the game has a standard structure of cells on the board.

The Game Interface

You must get familiar with the game interface as it will make it easier for you to learn how to play minesweeper, especially if you are new to the game.

There are certain basic features you will get on your display after loading your game. Knowing what these are and how to use them can make your game experience better.

Minesweeper Game

This feature is mostly at the top left corner of your game page. Clicking on this gives you a drop-down menu that presents you with multiple options. With this feature, you can choose a new game, set the game level you want to play; either the beginner, intermediate, expert, or custom.

You can also exit a game even when it is not over by using this game menu option.

The help button is always situated beside the game button at the top left corner. This feature gives you basic instructions on how to play the game and navigate around the board.

These minesweeper instructions are brief and fundamental, making them inadequate for properly mastering how to play minesweeper. It is why you may need a comprehensive review and minesweeper guide like this to help you learn how to win minesweeper.

The Timer

The game is timed, and this makes it more competitive. For a beginner, this might add a little pressure to your game. Here, the minesweeper trick is that you stay calm and stick to your guts while carefully interpreting the clues that lead to the next step until the game is won.

The Smiley

The smiley feature is one exciting feature. You get a yellow smiley at the start of the game, which probably indicates that all is well as you play. This yellow smiley changes once you click on the wrong cell and you detonate a bomb.

Clicking on a mined cell triggers an explosion, and you lose your game immediately.

The minimize button

You can use this button at either the top left or right area of your game, especially if you are using the Windows version, to hide the game. It allows you to leave the game page to attend to other things on your personal computer.

You can return to the game without losing it even when you have not saved the game. The trick here is to make sure you do not close the game.

How to Play the Minesweeper Game

Several people have had to learn how to play the minesweeper game via trial and error. When you get the game at first, you are not provided with explicit information on what to do or not. It might become worse when you make your first click and realize that a counter is there to time your game, giving a sense of urgency.

Most people have had to source for information outside of the minesweeper instructions provided by the developer. Congratulations! You have just found the right article to help you learn not only how to play mines but how to win minesweeper as well.

Your mouse is all you need to play the minesweeper game. You play the minesweeper game by uncovering all the cells on the board. It is a single-player game, so you do not have to take turns while playing. A win is determined according to the rules of the game.

The main techniques to the game involve the following:

1. Uncovering a cell : To reveal a compartment, you left-click on the cell to expose its content.

2. Flagging of a cell: Right-click on a cell to flag it as a potential mined section.

3. Questioning a cell: You do this when you are in doubt about what a section contains. Once you double click on the cell, the question mark appears on it.

The Minesweeper Rules: Learning How to Play and Win Minesweeper

By the game rules, you have to uncover all cells in the game that do not contain a mine to win a game. Be careful not to lose the game when you find a mined area.

You are expected to make a calculated guess about the contents of each cell before clicking on them. You get clues on what the next cell contains after a section has been uncovered. Any misinterpretation of the clues given to you by an uncovered cell can cost you the game if you, unfortunately, click on a mined section.

There are some common misconceptions about the minesweeper game we may need to clarify.

The basic minesweeper rules that guide the game are listed below;

Master the 6 Golden Tricks to Winning a Minesweeper Game

Despite being primarily dominated by luck, you need to develop skills in playing this game. There are tested and proven minesweeper tips that will help you improve your game skills. For this article’s sake, we have compiled six minesweeper tips, which we call the golden tricks.

Once you learn how to apply these golden tricks in every game, you are already on your way to becoming a professional minesweeper player.

Know What the Numbering Means

When playing the minesweeper game, you will find that you often get a number displayed on the cell after clicking a cell. Understanding what these numbers mean is your key to winning the game.

This number directs you on what cell is safe to click and what is not. To conclusively decide if a section will contain a mine or not, you may need to use the information on about two to three exposed cells around it.

The number displayed on an exposed cell tells you the number of mines adjacent to it. You might notice patterns, and the ability to interpret these numbering patterns will also increase your chances of winning the game.

Elimination Method

The minesweeper game is a typical puzzle you have to unravel. The best strategy to do this is by using the elimination method. For every cell you rightly decode, you have just eliminated that option. You keep doing this until you uncover the last safe cell (a non-mined cell), and you will win the game.

Dealing with Uncertainties

It is okay to be unsure about the content of a cell. These uncertainties may occur if the uncovered cells around the cell do not give full information to help know for sure if the section is mined or not. The beautiful thing about this is that you can go from known to unknown.

When you are faced with such a situation, question the cell as a tag. This way, you do not forget why you left it. You can then move on to uncover other cells. When you continue with your game, you get more information to guess your questioned section’s content correctly.

Only take Calculated Guesses

Minesweeper indeed involves some level of luck. It is, however, wrong to play the game guessing your way all through. This way, you might never win a game or learn to play the game properly.

While you may have to make guesses, always make sure there is the reasoning behind every decision to click a cell. You may be wrong at times, especially when you are just beginning to learn. However, as you go on, you will start to learn how to improve your guesses.

Use Tutorials

Minesweeper tutorial will always help you become a better player. For most games, you have the option of playing a tutorial before starting the game properly. Do not be hesitant in taking tutorials.

If you are beginning to study a pattern, tutorials are ways to perfect them to improve your game skills.

Keep Playing Minesweeper Game

The importance of constant practice cannot be overemphasized. No matter the volume of articles or game reviews you read, you are only as good as your level of training.

When you keep playing, there are several other tricks you will learn all by yourself. You would have discovered patterns that you are sure will always work, and even without serious thinking, you can decide what a cell contains when you see the number patterns.

Do not be scared of losing a game as a beginner. You pick lessons from every game lost, which helps you become the better player you seek to be.

Conclusion

The minesweeper game is one that will keep you focused till the end. You will particularly enjoy the game’s build-up, and every accurate click you make will give you a sense of achievement.

It would be best if you did not forget that continuous playing is the way to continually get better at the game. You perfect every trick you learn in a previous match at the next. No matter what, make sure you have fun all the way.

Try to play MineSweeper Online in our library.

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This board game will keep you busy and will train your brain, so be ready to show your skills!

Windows Minesweeper

Windows Minesweeper
Beginner level, XP version.
Authors:	Robert Donner, Curt Johnson
Initial release:	(1990-10-08) WEP
Latest release:	(2009-10-22) Windows 7
OS:	Windows
Language:	Multiple

Minesweeper is a logic game where mines are hidden in a grid of squares. The object is to open all safe squares in the quickest time possible. The game became famous when Microsoft included it with Windows 3.1 but its origins go further back.

Contents

Gameplay

Minesweeper starts when a player clicks on a square with the left mouse button. The first click is always safe and reveals a number or an opening surrounded by numbers. Each number tells you how many mines touch the square. You can mark a mine by putting a flag on it with the right mouse button. If all the mines touching a number are flagged, you can press both buttons on that number to clear the remaining adjacent squares.

You win by clearing all the safe squares and lose if you click on a mine. A mine counter tells you how many mines are still hidden and a time counter keeps track of your score. There are three levels of difficulty: Beginner has 10 mines, Intermediate has 40 mines, and Expert has 99 mines. It is also possible to create Custom levels.

Basic Strategy

For a detailed discussion of strategy and tips, visit the Minesweeper Strategy page.

Patterns

Each pattern has only one solution and can be memorised to save time.

The most basic pattern is when a number touches the same number of closed squares. All touching squares must be mines.

The 1 touches 1 square

This 3 touches 3 squares

This 5 touches 5 squares

This 8 touches 8 squares

The next step is to learn the 1-2-1 and 1-2-2-1 patterns. These patterns are easy to recognise.

When you get really advanced, you will see 1-2-1 and 1-2-2-1 patterns everywhere.

242 reduces to 121‎

345 reduces to 121

1222 reduces to 1221

2331 reduces to 1221

Efficiency

The fewer clicks you take, the faster you will finish. Learn to be efficient.

The game ends when all safe squares are open, not when all mines are flagged. Beginners often waste time flagging every mine. The only good reason to flag is to clear more squares by chording. So before you place a flag, decide if it is useful.

Flagging the 3 is useless because you can not use it to chord

This flag is useful, but a flag in the corner is not

Some players never flag because time used placing flags could be better used opening more squares. This style is called No Flags, or NF. Flaggers argue that flags allow you to chord and clear multiple squares at the same time. The best players use both styles in the same game to maximise efficiency. It is generally agreed that NF is more efficient near high numbers (5,6,7,8) and low 3BV boards, while Flagging is more efficient near low numbers (1,2,3,4) and high 3BV boards. For example, chording on a 1 only requires one flag and clears up to seven empty squares. Chording on a 7 requires seven flags, but a NF player would click just once on the empty square.

Guessing

Sometimes in Minesweeper you have to guess. A typical case is a 50/50 guess when one mine is hidden in two squares. However, there are other times when you can improve your chance of guessing correctly. For example, an arrangement of numbers can have more than one equally possible solution. If these solutions require different quantities of mines, you can solve it by flagging the rest of the board and seeing how many mines are left. Someone who prefers guessing immediately can still improve their chances. For example, Expert has a higher percentage of mines than Intermediate, so the solution with more mines is more likely on Expert than Intermediate.

Another thing to remember when guessing is usefulness. If two solutions are equally likely, choose the one that helps most if correct. Sometimes one solution prevents another guess or creates an easier arrangement of mines.

Community

In the beginning, Minesweeper was an innocent past-time enjoyed by a silent but dedicated following. Then Microsoft decided to include the game in their operating system, just in time for the explosion of the World Wide Web. The community has been growing ever since and is more addicted than ever!

Join Us

There are many ways to get involved in the Minesweeper community. The most popular place to meet is at Authoritative Minesweeper, which hosts the world rankings. You can post scores in the Guestbook, chat in the Forum or compete in the Active Ranking. Another popular hangout is the IRC minesweeper chat group, or you can join the Minesweeper Facebook Page. The center of the Chinese sweeping community is www.saolei.net, with extensive rankings and forums. A similar site exists at www.minesweeper.ru for Russian players. Each year there are one or two international tournaments, where the best players meet and compete.

Basic Facts

The minimum number of lefts clicks needed to solve a board is called its 3BV and speed is measured by 3bv/s. Other more complicated statistics include IOE, RQP, IOS, Zini and OBV.

A famously easy game known as the Dreamboard led to the discovery of Board Cycles in 2000. The Beginner (8×8) and Intermediate (16×16) levels have a small set of games that repeat. Players used this information to memorise and play only the best boards. Knowing information about a game before it starts is banned and called having Unfair Prior Knowledge. Elmar Technique is also banned from rankings.

Microsoft versions of Minesweeper are no longer accepted for world rankings. Windows XP and all earlier versions have known Bugs, Cheats, Board Cycles and Solvers. Although Vista solved these problems it changed several rules, making its scores useless for comparison. The community solved these problems by creating official clones. First attempts included Project Minesweeper Utopia and Global Mines. The accepted clones are Minesweeper Clone, Arbiter, Minesweeper X and Viennasweeper. Each of these use decimal time and automatically save your best times on video.

The Story

A New Game

Robert Donner and Curt Johnson were both hired by Microsoft in 1989. Curt had written a program for OS/2 where the object was to find a path across a minefield from one corner to another. Robert wanted to write a game for Windows as a programming exercise, and Curt let him have the source code to use as a starting point. He wrote the main application over a weekend and kept the original number and mine graphics. Curt was involved with «the inital random ideas we had for the game.» The new game was simply called ‘Mine’.

After watching a friend test the program, Donner changed the goal of the game to opening all safe squares. The original version had hidden coins that allowed you to survive stepping on a mine. Instead of the time counter there was a coin counter. A later release replaced the mouse cursor with a foot, which turned into a bloody stump when a mine was hit. According to Donner, «I did the graphics for this, so it didn’t look very good».

Donner added the famous XYZZY cheat «so another friend of mine could impress people with his psychic abilities». This cheat was a magic word in Colossal Cave Adventure, one of the first games he had played on a computer. Chording was added after watching a much faster friend clicking through the game. In keeping with the foot cursor, the original Help file called this a ‘Big Step’. As the game involved mines and was written for Windows, he named the executable file Winmine.exe, in compliance with the 8.3 FAT file system used at the time. He added the Smiley Face, and the «idea for the sunglasses was grabbed from one of the card decks in Solitaire.»

One of these versions passed amongst friends was Mine 2.9 written by 9 Jul 1990. It featured bombs instead of mines and a 24×24 Expert grid. The credits thank «CurtJ, LarryH, RobD» and amusingly claims copyright by «Duff Software». Webster defines duff as «of poor quality».

The WEP edition of the game listed the version as Minesweeper 3.0 to coincide with the current version of Windows. Robert Donner and Curt Johnson are listed as authors with the copyright belonging to Microsoft. The game became famous when Microsoft included it alongside Solitaire in the release of Windows 3.1 on 6 Apr 1992.

Shoulders of Giants

Unique ideas are rare, and computer games are no exception. Minesweeper owes its existence to earlier games.

The earliest proven inspiration for Minesweeper is Mined-Out, written in BASIC and published by Quicksilva (UK) in 1983 for the ZX Spectrum computer. The object is to cross a minefield starting at the bottom of the grid and arriving at the top. After each move you are warned of adjacent mines. There are nine levels to the game which add features such as damsels to be rescued, a mine that chases you, and mine spreaders that add or remove mines. The player moves around the grid using a keyboard.

Mined-Out clones include Yomp, released later in 1983 by Virgin Games (UK) for the ZX Spectrum. In it the player needs to get three paratroopers across a busy road and then across a minefield in order to win medals. Another clone was Relentless Logic, written in DOS at least by November 1985. This game was not officially released but was passed between friends at work and through Bulletin Board Systems in the USA. It also featured a rectangular grid of squares (9×15) and warned you of adjacent mines. Its new features included crossing from left to right, counting mines located diagonally, adding a move counter and a timer. Instead of having nine levels it allowed you to change the number of mines from 10 to 40, and you were upgraded from a worm to a Marine.

Relentless Logic in turn inspired various clones. XMines was written in November 1987 for the SunTools operating system by Tom Anderson (USA). He introduced a Mouse and used the left button to open squares, the middle button to mark mines and the right button to mark safe squares. The grid was increased to 16×16 and the number of mines increased. Brian Dalio (USA) modifed the game over the next month to allow users to move to any square previously visited. A major innovation was putting numbers in previously visited squares to remind you how many mines it touched. At the end of the game, incorrectly marked mines were highlighted with an ‘X’. In November 1989 Thomas Eldridge (USA) released Kaboooom, which also added numbers and the ability to mark mines. The most important Relentless Logic clone was written by Curt Johnson (USA) for the OS/2 operating system in 1989. When Robert Donner expressed an interest in programming a game for Windows, Curt gave him the sourcecode as a starting point. Over the next year the game evolved into Minesweeper.

Earlier Games

Sometimes games have similar features completely by accident. Several early games have been claimed as the origin of Minesweeper purely on this idea. This section discusses various possibilities.

David Ahl published many other user submitted programs, including several hidden object games. All of these games were code printouts the user needed to type into their computer. The original 1973 edition featured the games Hurkle, Mugwump and Queen. In Hurkle the player has 5 tries to guess the coordinate of a hidden Hurkle on a 10×10 grid. After each incorrect guess the game states the direction of the hidden monster. It was written by Bob Albrecht (USA) of the ‘People’s Computer Company’. In Mugwump the player has 10 guesses to find 4 hidden Mugwumps on a 10×10 grid. After each guess the distance to each Mugwump is stated but not the direction. For example, after guessing 5,5 the game may warn you are 4.6 units from Mugwump #1. It was written by students of Bud Valenti in Pittsburgh and modified by Bob Albrecht. These two games are early examples of using clues or numbers to locate objects. In Queen the player places a chess queen on the top or rightmost row of an 8×8 grid. The player then alternates turns with the computer, trying be first to the bottom left corner using legal chess moves. This is an early example of a grid crossing game. The 1979 edition featured Blackbox. In this game the player locates atoms hidden on an 8×8 grid by shooting a ray across the grid and observing deflections. It was written by Jeff Kenton (USA) and based on a game described in the August 1977 edition of ‘Games and Puzzles’.

In addition to writing Hurkle, Bob Albrecht also wrote Snark. The player guesses a coordinate and chooses the radius of a net to throw. The game tells you if the Snark is in the net, and your job is to capture it with a zero radius net. Albrecht published Snark as part of a compilation of games collected in 1975 and sold in the book «What to Do After You Hit Return».

As these surviving examples show, grid games using clues to find hidden objects were common by the early 1970’s. By 1973 there was at least one game with hidden mines and another with the object of crossing a grid.

Minefield was printed in the May 1982 edition of Sinclair User magazine. The player tries to move a tank safely from left to right across the screen. Mines are randomly hidden by the computer. If a tank explodes, the player tries again with the next one. The game stops when a tank reaches safety and a score (the number of lost tanks) is displayed at the top of the screen. It was written by I S Howson of the UK. In October 1982 the magazine printed Minefields by D G Lomas (UK). The player is a Formula 1 racing driver who must drive across 10 increasingly difficult minefields. All mines are visible, and your task is to steer around them. Each level requires 32 moves to cross the screen and there is 1 point for each move taken for a total of 320 points. Hitting a mine stops the level and gives the player a 5 point penalty before continuing to the next level. Both games were written in BASIC for the ZX81 Spectrum computer. A clone of this game, called Mine Driver, was released in 1985 by Grupo de Trabajo Software (Spain) as part of a compilation.

You can see how this list could be endless. Some of these games have been claimed as inspirations for Minesweeper but none are proven to be connected. They are listed for context and historical interest.

Version History

Little is known about the early Beta versions of Minesweeper. One featured a foot cursor that exploded if it stepped on a mine. Another version had coins which enabled you to survive mines. The game was originally titled ‘Mine’.

Mine 2.9

All beta versions of minesweeper were lost until Damien Moore (webmaster of this site) discovered Mine 2.9 in a collection of games uploaded to extinct Bulletin Board Systems. This version was made in July 1990 and passed between friends at work. Although the game was called Mines it used bomb graphics. It introduced all the standard rules and mouse functions such as flags and chording. Its three difficulty levels were Beginner (8×8, 10 mines), Intermediate (16×16, 40 mines) and Expert (24×24, 99 mines). The Game menu featured ‘New F2’, ‘Beginner’, ‘Intermediate’, ‘Expert’, ‘Sound’, ‘Marks (?)’, ‘Preferences. F3’ and ‘Exit’. The Help menu offered ‘Index F1’, ‘Keyboard’, ‘Using Help’ and ‘About WinMine’. Options unique to the Preference box included creating custom levels, enabling a ‘Ticker’ or removing the Menu bar. The Ticker simply ticked each second in imitation of a time bomb. Sound included a siren for hitting a mine or a rising one octave scale for winning a game.

There was a lot of redundancy between the menus. For example, you could access Help from the Help menu, About box or Preference box. Likewise you could access Preferences from the About box or the Game menu, and access About from the game icon or the Help menu. Despite being options on the Game menu, the Preference box also allowed you to change level and enable sound and marks.

The Help file was very detailed. It noted you could find mines by using a «mine detector» or «your foot». Stepping on a mine killed you, while chording was described as taking a «Big Step». The instructions claimed you could select «Safe Step» from the Preferences box, and this would prevent chording if not enough mines were flagged. This appears to be leftover from an earlier version, as Mine 2.9 and all later versions have this feature as standard.