Minesweeper Rules and Tips

Minesweeper is a game where you open every cell on a grid except the ones hiding a mine. It looks like a game of luck, but the number printed on each opened cell tells you how many mines hide among its neighbors, so most moves can actually be settled by arithmetic. If you don't know where to click, chances are you haven't read all the clues yet.

The game spread widely after it shipped by default with Windows in the early 1990s, giving nearly everyone a chance to open it at least once. Countless variants changing the board size and mine count followed, but the core idea, reading numbers to find certain cells, has stayed the same ever since.

The shape of the board

The board is a grid of square cells, and a set number of them hide mines. Every cell starts closed, so you can't tell which ones are mines just by looking. Where the mines sit is already decided the moment the board is generated, and it does not change while you play.

How to open a cell

Click a closed cell to open it. If it's not a mine, a number appears that tells you how many of its eight neighboring cells hold a mine. A cell with no mines nearby shows 0 and appears blank, and in that case its neighbors open automatically in a chain, revealing a wide open area at once.

Flags

Plant a flag on any cell you're sure is a mine. A flag doesn't directly affect the game; it's closer to a note recording your own judgment. Planting one prevents you from accidentally clicking that cell and makes it much easier to count surrounding numbers by eye.

Ending conditions

Open a cell with a mine and you lose on the spot. Open every non-mine cell without exception and you win. Flagging every mine is not itself a win condition, so if a safe, unopened cell remains even after all your flags are placed, the round isn't over.

Board size and mine count

This board is nine by nine, eighty-one cells, hiding ten mines. Seventy-one safe cells need opening, roughly one mine for every eight cells. There is no difficulty setting to change the board size or mine count.

The center is always safe

No mine is ever placed in the center cell or its eight neighbors. That means the center cell's number is always 0, so clicking it first always triggers a chain that opens up an area and hands you a set of clues at once. One thing worth noting: this isn't a first-click protection that saves whichever cell you click first; the safe spot is fixed at the center. Clicking a corner first can hit a mine.

Everyone gets the same board on the same day

Mine placement is determined by the date. Anyone who visits on the same day gets the same board, and a new one opens when the date changes. The share text only carries whether you succeeded and how much you opened, never the mine positions, so sending it to someone who hasn't solved it yet won't leak the board.

How to plant a flag

The button above the board switches between open mode and flag mode, and on a computer you can right-click without switching modes to plant a flag directly. The mines-left counter beside it is simply ten minus however many flags you've planted, so a wrong flag throws that number off too. Plant more than needed and it goes negative.

What this board doesn't do for you

There's no undo after hitting a mine, and no chord-click to open an already-revealed number's neighbors at once. Revealing a safe cell and flagging a certain mine are available in a small free daily amount, and the puzzle itself and its one-round-a-day structure stay free regardless of that limit. Every technique below is something you can read and judge yourself, with or without the helpers.

Progress stays in this browser

Once you make your first move, every opened cell and planted flag is recorded in this browser's storage, so accidentally closing the tab or refreshing picks up right where you left off. Nothing is sent to a server. That said, saved progress only covers that day's board; when the date changes, yesterday's progress does not carry over and a new board opens.

A number is the mine count among its eight neighbors

When reading a number, always look only at the eight cells around it. If a cell showing 1 has only one closed neighbor left, that neighbor is the mine. Plant a flag there. Conversely, if a cell showing 2 already has two flags among its neighbors, every other closed neighbor is safe to open without worry.

These two checks cover almost all of Minesweeper's deduction. If a number equals its remaining closed neighbors, all of those neighbors are mines; if a number's worth of flags is already planted, the rest are all safe. When a board feels stuck, it's usually because you haven't run these two checks everywhere yet.

Opening order

After clicking the center to open up some space, scan the numbers along the edge of that open area. Open any cell you can confirm, then scan around whatever new numbers it reveals, repeating the cycle. Touching an ambiguous spot while a certain cell is still available risks losing a board you didn't have to lose.

Lingering on one spot too long also costs you. A spot that won't resolve now often resolves on its own once a cell opens elsewhere and adds a clue, so it's faster to keep clearing the cells you can confirm and widen the board first.

Comparing two overlapping numbers

When two neighboring numbers each cover a shared set of closed cells, and one's set is fully contained in the other's, the answer comes from the difference between them. If the two numbers are equal but one covers extra cells, those extra cells are safe; if the numbers differ by exactly the number of extra cells, those extra cells are all mines. This is the reasoning that lets you confirm the outer cell is safe when two 1s sit side by side along a wall.

Reading common patterns at a glance

Frequently occurring arrangements are faster to recognize by shape than to work out from scratch each time. If three open cells read 1, 2, 1 in a row with the row beneath them fully closed, the two outer cells are mines and the middle is safe. If four open cells read 1, 2, 2, 1, it's the reverse: the two middle cells are mines and the outer ones are safe. Both follow directly from adding and subtracting the numbers, so memorizing them is reliable.

Using walls and corners

An edge cell has five neighbors and a corner cell has only three, so the same number carries much stronger information when it sits against a wall. A 1 in the middle of the board means one mine among eight cells, but a 1 in a corner means one mine among three. When you're stuck, recounting from a wall-side number often unlocks a spot.

Factoring in the mines-left count

Late in a round you can treat the whole board as one equation. There are ten mines total, so if your flags are accurate, the mines-left count is exactly how many mines remain unfound. If two mines remain and two are already confirmed along a boundary, every closed cell far from that boundary is safe. Conversely, if the remaining closed cells equal the remaining mine count, all of those cells are mines.

When there really is no certain cell

Sometimes you scan every number and still find nothing you can confirm. A common case is a single 1 overlooking two closed cells with no other number distinguishing between them; no amount of staring resolves that by logic alone. Once you've confirmed there's no certain cell, guessing is the right call.

If you have to guess, where

Even a guess can be weighed by probability. If a 1 overlooks two cells, each carries roughly a fifty percent chance, but if the board has two mines left among twenty closed cells, a cell far from any boundary carries a much lower chance. In that case, opening an uninformative interior cell instead of touching an ambiguous boundary gives you better odds of surviving, and if that cell turns out to be open space, the resulting chain can unlock spots that were stuck.

When your first click on a corner hits a mine

The only guaranteed mine-free spot on this board is the center, so clicking a corner right at the start can hit a mine. It feels unlucky, but it's the rule working as intended, and since the board is fixed by date, clicking there again finds the same mine in the same place. Starting with the center is the clearly better move.

When a wrong flag keeps the round from ending

A flagged cell doesn't open when clicked, and a chain stops at it too. So a wrongly planted flag on a safe cell leaves that one spot closed even after a chain opens everything around it, leaving you feeling done while the round refuses to end. If only a few cells remain unopened and the round still won't end, suspect your flags first; lift any flag you can't remember the reason for and recount the numbers.

When the numbers seem not to add up

When a calculation seems off, it's almost always a miscount of the scanning range. A number counts all eight neighbors including diagonals, and a wall-side cell doesn't count anything outside the board. The mines-left counter is also back-calculated from your flag count, so a wrong flag throws it off too. The board itself isn't wrong; the mismatch is in how you're counting.