Minesweeper

How to play

1. Choose a difficulty: beginner is 9×9 with 10 mines, intermediate 16×16 with 40, and expert 30×16 with 99.
2. Click any square to begin. The mines are placed after that click, so it is always safe and always opens a region.
3. Each revealed square shows how many of its eight neighbours hold a mine. A blank square touches none, so the game opens its whole neighbourhood for you.
4. Mark a square you believe is a mine: right-click on a desktop, long press on a touchscreen, or turn on the 🚩 flag mode toggle and tap.
5. Open every safe square and the field is cleared. Open a mine and the run ends — the face at the top tells you which way it went: 🙂 playing, 😮 mid-click, 😎 cleared, 😵 boom.

Keyboard players can tab onto the board, move the cursor with the arrow keys, open with Enter, flag with F and start a new game with N. The arrow keys will not scroll the page while the board has focus.

The rules behind the numbers

Minesweeper is not really about clicking — it is a constraint puzzle. Every visible number is a statement: exactly this many of my hidden neighbours are mines. Solving a board means combining those statements until one of them forces an answer.

The two basic deductions carry most games:

• A satisfied number is finished. If a 1 already touches one flag, every other hidden neighbour of that 1 is safe. Click them, or chord the number to open them all at once.
• A cornered number is solved. If a 3 has exactly three hidden neighbours left, all three are mines. Flag them without thinking further.

Everything harder is built by comparing two numbers that share squares. The classic pattern is 1-2-1 along a wall: the mines sit under the two 1s and the square under the 2 is safe, every time. The 1-1 pattern is almost as common — when two adjacent 1s share a hidden square and one of them has an extra hidden neighbour the other cannot see, that extra square is safe.

Rules and the difficulty score

There is no points system in Minesweeper; the clock is the score. But raw time hides a lot, because boards differ wildly in how much work they actually contain. That is what the 3BV figure under the board measures.

A board is scored one point per empty region (a connected group of blank squares, which opens in a single click along with its border numbers) plus one point for every numbered square that no empty region touches. Two expert boards can differ by more than 30 points of 3BV, which is a bigger gap than most players’ skill variance — so comparing 3BV/s across games tells you far more about improvement than comparing raw times.

Best times are stored per difficulty. The clock starts on your first click, not when the page loads, so you can take as long as you like deciding where to open.

Tips to improve

• Stop guessing early. Beginners lose most games to impatience, not to genuinely unsolvable positions. Before you click a doubtful square, scan every number you can already see once more.
• Learn the 1-2-1 and 1-1 patterns. They appear in almost every board along edges, and recognising them instantly is worth more than any amount of clicking speed.
• Flag only when it pays. A flag that will let you chord a number is worth planting. A flag you place for tidiness is pure lost time.
• Chord aggressively once you trust your flags. On expert boards, chording is the difference between a three-minute clear and a ninety-second one.
• Work the edges first. Walls and corners reduce the number of unknown neighbours, so numbers there constrain far more tightly than numbers in open space.
• Open a new region rather than grind a hard corner. If a section needs real work, click somewhere fresh — new information often solves the stuck corner for free.
• Accept the coin flips. A small fraction of boards genuinely end in a fifty-fifty. Pick one, move on, and judge yourself on the other ninety-odd percent.

On a phone the expert field is wider than the screen, so the board scrolls sideways inside its own frame rather than dragging the whole page around.

Privacy

Board generation, the timer and every deduction happen entirely in your browser. No move is sent anywhere, there is no account, and the game works offline once the page has loaded. Your best time per difficulty is kept in this device’s localStorage; it stays on this device, and the clear button removes it permanently.

Last reviewed: September 21, 2026