How to play
Every square on the board is either empty or hides a mine. When you open an empty square it shows a number from one to eight, and that number is the count of mines in the eight squares touching it, diagonals included. If the count is zero the square comes up blank and the board automatically opens the whole blank region around it, stopping at the first ring of numbers. You win the moment every square without a mine is open. You lose the instant you open a mine.
The mines are placed after your first click, never before, and the routine that places them refuses to use the square you clicked or any of its neighbors. That is why your opening move always produces a blank area rather than an instant loss: you are handed a starting island of numbers and the game becomes a reasoning problem from the first second. Every board after that is honest — nothing is repositioned to punish or rescue you later in the run.
Flags are notes for you. Marking a square does not defuse anything and a wrong flag never ends the game; it simply blocks accidental clicks and subtracts one from the mines counter above the board. Many strong players barely use flags on the small board and rely on them heavily on the large one, where keeping thirty separate deductions in your head is not realistic.
Controls
- Open a square: left click on desktop, a single tap on touch, or Enter when the square has keyboard focus.
- Flag a square: right click on desktop, a press of about half a second on touch, or F from the keyboard. Right click never opens the browser menu over the board.
- Move around: the arrow keys walk the focus one square at a time, so the whole game is playable without a mouse.
- Flag mode: the toggle under the board turns ordinary taps into flags, which is the comfortable way to mark a lot of squares on a phone.
- New game and difficulty: Beginner is nine by nine with ten mines, Intermediate is sixteen by sixteen with forty, and Expert is sixteen by thirty with ninety-nine. The wide board scrolls sideways on a narrow screen.
Strategy: read the numbers instead of guessing
The first habit to build is counting a number against the flags already touching it. If a three has three flags around it, that number is satisfied, and every remaining covered square touching it is safe to open right now. This sounds obvious and it is still where most avoidable losses come from, because players open the square that looks interesting rather than the square they have already proved. Work the border of your opened region cell by cell, satisfy each number in turn, and a surprising amount of the board falls out for free.
The next step is comparing two numbers that share squares. The classic case is the 1-2-1 pattern along a wall: three numbers in a row, reading one, two, one, with three covered squares in front of them. The two needs two mines and the ones each need exactly one, and the only arrangement that satisfies all three puts mines under the two outer squares and leaves the middle square safe. The 1-2-2-1 pattern along an edge resolves the mirror way: the mines sit under the two middle squares, and the squares in front of the ones are clear. Learning to recognize these on sight converts what feels like a fifty-fifty into a certainty, and they appear constantly on the Intermediate and Expert boards because long straight edges are exactly where numbers line up.
When no pattern applies, subtract overlapping regions. Suppose a two and a one touch each other and every covered square the one can see is also seen by the two. Then the one accounts for a single mine inside that shared area, so the second mine belonging to the two must be in the part of its neighborhood that the one cannot see. That single subtraction step solves more of a hard board than any memorized shape, and it works when the shapes are irregular. On the Expert board it is also worth counting globally near the end: if the mines counter reads two and you have exactly two covered squares left in an isolated corner, the rest of the board is safe regardless of what the local numbers say.
Some boards genuinely force a guess. The honest test is whether two complete mine arrangements are consistent with every number you can see; if both fit, no amount of thinking will separate them, and the deduction has run out rather than your patience. When that happens, prefer the square that belongs to the largest ambiguous group, since the odds there are usually better than in a tight two-square tie, and prefer opening away from a wall, where a blank result is more likely to cascade and give you fresh information. Guessing early also beats guessing late, because a wrong guess in the first ten seconds costs you almost nothing.
Timings from our own play testing, offered as estimates and not records: a confident player usually clears Beginner in well under a minute, Intermediate tends to settle somewhere in the two to four minute range once flag discipline is automatic, and Expert boards commonly run past ten minutes and are lost to a forced guess often enough to be frustrating. Treat these as rough targets for your own progress, nothing more.
Where the game came from
The idea is older than the version most people remember. Games about probing a hidden grid and deducing where the hazards sit circulated on home computers and mainframe terminals before the puzzle had a standard name, so the genre clearly predates Microsoft's involvement. What made it a household game was Microsoft shipping a version with Windows in the early 1990s, where it sat next to Solitaire and quietly taught a generation of office workers to use the right mouse button.
The implementation on this page is ours, written from scratch for this site, and so is every word of the text around it. We kept the standard rules and the three familiar board sizes because that is the shared language players expect, and we added the safe first click, the long press flag and the per difficulty best time because those are quality of life details rather than changes to the puzzle. Mine positions come from your browser's random number generator through an unbiased shuffle, so no region of the board is quietly favored.
Questions players ask
Is the first click always safe in this version?
Yes. The mines are not placed until you open your first square, and the placement routine excludes that square and all eight squares touching it. Your opening move therefore always lands on a zero, which gives you an opening area to work from instead of a coin flip.
Do you ever have to guess in Minesweeper?
Sometimes, yes. Most positions that look like a guess are actually solvable once you compare two overlapping numbers, but a board can end in a genuine tie where two arrangements fit every clue equally well. In that case there is no deduction left and you pick the square with the better odds.
Do flags do anything besides mark a square?
They protect the square from being opened by a stray click and they feed the mines counter, which shows the mine total minus the flags you have placed. They are your notes, not a defusal: a wrong flag never ends the game, it just quietly makes the rest of your counting wrong.