What is Minesweeper?
Minesweeper is a logic puzzle played on a grid. Some squares hide mines; most do not. Every square you open safely shows a number telling you how many of the eight squares around it are mined. Your job is to open every square that is not a mine, using nothing but those numbers.
It is not a game of luck, despite its reputation. On a typical board the overwhelming majority of moves are forced — there is exactly one square that logic proves is safe, and finding it is the whole game. Guessing is a last resort, and good players guess far less often than beginners assume.
The version most people remember shipped with Windows from 1990 onward, but the idea is older: it descends from 1980s games like Mined-Out and Cube. What Microsoft added was the three-difficulty structure and the flag, and those have stuck for thirty-five years.
How to play Minesweeper
- Click anywhere to start. The first click is always safe — mines are placed after it, never under it or its eight neighbours. The timer starts on this click.
- Read the numbers. A 1 means exactly one of the eight touching squares is mined. A blank square touches no mines at all, so the board opens the whole empty region around it automatically.
- Flag what you can prove. Right-click on a computer, long-press on a phone. Flags stop you clicking a square by accident and unlock chording.
- Chord to move fast. Click a number that already has the right count of flags around it and every remaining neighbour opens at once.
- Clear every safe square to win. You do not need to flag all the mines — the game ends the moment the last non-mine square is open.
Minesweeper rules
- Every square is either a mine or safe. There is nothing else.
- A revealed number counts mines in the eight surrounding squares, including diagonals.
- Opening a mine ends the game immediately.
- Flags are your notes. They do nothing mechanically except block accidental clicks and feed chording; flagging a square wrongly costs you nothing until you chord on it.
- You win when every non-mine square is open, flagged or not.
- The mine counter shows mines minus flags placed, not mines actually remaining. Place a wrong flag and it lies to you.
What do the numbers mean?
This is the single thing beginners get wrong. The number is not a distance and it is not a direction — it is a count of mines in the eight squares that touch it, diagonals included. A square in the middle of the board has eight neighbours; on an edge it has five; in a corner, three.
| Number | Means | Typical action |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | One mine in the eight neighbours | The most useful number on the board. A 1 with exactly one unopened neighbour has found its mine. |
| 2 | Two mines | Pairs with a neighbouring 1 to solve the classic 1-2 pattern. |
| 3 | Three mines | Common along walls. A 3 on an edge with three unopened neighbours is fully determined. |
| 4 | Four mines | Usually appears in dense clusters. Count carefully before chording. |
| 5 | Five mines | Rare outside Expert. Often means the remaining unopened neighbours are all mines. |
| 6 | Six mines | Very rare. With only six or seven neighbours left, nearly everything around it is mined. |
| 7 | Seven mines | Almost always fully determined: seven of eight neighbours are mines. |
| 8 | Eight mines | Every single neighbour is a mine. Flag all eight and move on. |
| blank | No mines touching | Nothing to decide — the board opens the whole connected empty area for you. |
What flags are for
A flag is a note to yourself. The game does not check it, reward it, or require it. Placing a flag does exactly two things: it stops that square being opened by a stray click, and it counts toward chording.
That second point is why strong players flag aggressively in some situations and barely at all in others. If you intend to chord a number, you must flag its mines first. If you are simply reading the board, flags cost time. Speed players on Beginner often finish with almost no flags placed at all.
Press the flag again to cycle to a question mark — a useful "I think this is a mine but I am not certain" marker — and once more to clear it.
How the first click works
On this board the first click is guaranteed safe, and so are its eight neighbours where the board has room to spare them. That is not a courtesy; it is how the board is built. The grid is empty until you click, and only then are mines scattered into the remaining squares. There is no way to lose on move one.
Because the whole 3×3 pocket around your first click is kept clear, that click almost always opens a blank region rather than a lone number, which gives you something to reason from immediately. On a maximum-density custom board where sparing nine squares is impossible, the guarantee shrinks to the clicked square itself — the tool tells you this rather than quietly failing.
Minesweeper difficulty levels
The three classic sizes have been standard since the early nineties, and the mine density is what actually makes them harder — not the size.
| Difficulty | Board | Mines | Density | Recommended for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Beginner | 9 × 9 (81) | 10 | 12.3% | Learning the numbers. A good game takes 10–40 seconds. |
| Intermediate | 16 × 16 (256) | 40 | 15.6% | Once you can clear Beginner reliably. 40–150 seconds. |
| Expert | 16 × 30 (480) | 99 | 20.6% | The standard competitive board. Under 100 seconds is strong. |
| Evil | 20 × 30 (600) | 145 | 24.2% | Denser than Expert. Expect to be forced into guesses. |
| Custom | 5×5 up to 40×60 | your choice | your choice | Practising a specific density, or a quick 8×8 on a phone. |
Notice the jump from Beginner to Expert is not really about the extra 399 squares — it is that roughly one square in five is mined instead of one in eight. Denser boards produce more ambiguous configurations, which is where guessing creeps in.
Minesweeper controls
| Action | Desktop | Mobile | Keyboard |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open a square | Left click | Tap | Enter or Space |
| Flag a mine | Right click | Long-press, or Flag mode + tap | F |
| Chord | Click a finished number, or middle click | Tap a finished number | Enter on a number |
| Move around | Mouse | Touch | ←↑→↓, Home, End |
| New game | Click the face | Tap the face | R |
| Change difficulty | Difficulty buttons | Difficulty buttons | 1 2 3 |
Chording — the technique that halves your time
Chording is the single biggest speed improvement available, and most casual players have never heard of it. If a revealed number already has exactly that many flags around it, then by definition every other neighbour is safe. Clicking that number opens them all at once.
A 3 with three flags around it and four unopened neighbours: one click opens the fourth. On a full Expert board this turns hundreds of individual clicks into a few dozen. It is also the reason to flag at all.
The safety rail matters: if the flags do not match the number, chording does nothing and the cell gives a small nudge animation rather than detonating something. But if you have flagged wrongly and the count happens to match, chording will open a mine. Chording is exactly as reliable as your flags.
On this board, chording on touch is simply tapping a revealed number — since tapping an already-open square has no other meaning, no extra mode or gesture is needed.
Minesweeper strategy for beginners
Start in a corner
Corner and edge squares have fewer neighbours — three and five instead of eight — so the numbers there constrain far fewer possibilities and are much easier to solve. Opening in a corner also tends to reveal a larger blank region, because blank areas propagate outward.
The 1-1 rule
Two adjacent 1s along a wall, with unopened squares in front of them: the mine is in the square they share, and the outer squares are safe. This one pattern will carry you through most of Beginner.
The 1-2-1 pattern
A row reading 1-2-1 with three unopened squares beneath: mines sit under the two 1s, and the square under the 2 is safe. It looks backwards the first time you see it, and it is always true.
Count before you click
Every mistake in Minesweeper is a counting mistake. Before opening anything, find one number and check whether its unopened neighbours are already fully explained. If the count of unopened neighbours equals the number minus the flags already placed, all of them are mines.
Two rules that solve most of the board
- If a number equals its unopened neighbour count (minus flags), every one of those neighbours is a mine.
- If a number equals its flag count, every other neighbour is safe — chord it.
Apply those two alternately and you will solve the great majority of any board without a single guess.
Advanced strategy: subsets and probability
The subset rule
When one number's unopened neighbours are a subset of another's, you can subtract them. If a 2 covers squares {A, B, C} and a 1 covers {A, B}, then the 1 accounts for one mine among A and B, so C must be a mine. This single technique resolves most situations that look like they need a guess.
Counting the endgame
Late in a game the mine counter becomes a genuine constraint. If three mines remain and one region can only hold two, the third is somewhere specific. Players who finish Expert consistently are doing global counting, not just local pattern reading.
When you truly must guess
Sometimes the board offers no forced move. Then:
- Prefer the lower probability. A square constrained by a 1 with three unopened neighbours is a 1-in-3 risk; an untouched square in open space is roughly the global density, often better.
- Prefer corners and edges when probabilities tie — they generate more information when they turn out safe.
- Guess early, not late. A guess with 90% of the board left costs less than one with three squares to go.
Roughly speaking, a well-played Expert game will still be lost to a forced guess a meaningful fraction of the time. That is a property of the puzzle, not a failure of your play.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Trusting the mine counter. It shows mines minus flags. One wrong flag and every count you do afterwards is wrong.
- Chording on unverified flags. The most common way experienced players lose. Chording trusts your flags absolutely.
- Forgetting diagonals. Eight neighbours, not four. This is the beginner error.
- Flagging everything. Flags cost time and only pay off when you chord. If you are not going to chord that number, do not flag it.
- Grinding a stuck corner. If a region will not resolve, open a fresh area. New information often solves the old region for free.
How to get faster
Speed comes from three things, in order: chording, not flagging unnecessarily, and reading patterns without consciously counting. Play Beginner repeatedly until 1-1 and 1-2-1 are instant recognition rather than deliberate arithmetic — that transfers directly to bigger boards.
Do not chase Expert times before Intermediate is comfortable. The board is the same puzzle; only the density changes. If you want to time yourself away from the game, our online notepad is handy for jotting session notes, and the typing speed test scratches a similar "beat your own number" itch.
Minesweeper on mobile
Most Minesweeper sites are desktop games that happen to load on a phone. The two things that break are flagging — there is no right click — and board size.
Here, long-press flags. Press and hold a square for about a third of a second and it flags, with a short vibration where the device supports it. Sliding your finger more than a few pixels cancels it, so scrolling the board never drops a flag by accident, and the browser's own text-selection and context menus are suppressed on the board. If you prefer an explicit mode, the Flag mode button switches tapping to flagging.
For board size, Expert on a phone is 30 columns wide, and squeezing that into 360 pixels gives 11-pixel cells nobody can hit. Instead the board keeps a usable cell size and the stage scrolls, with zoom controls and a fit-to-screen button. You always know which square you are touching.
Keyboard controls and accessibility
The board is a real ARIA grid of real buttons, so it works with a keyboard and with a screen reader. Arrow keys move a cursor, Enter opens or chords, F flags, R starts a new game. Only the focused square is in the tab order — a roving tabindex — so Tab takes you past the board rather than through 480 separate stops.
Each square announces its position and state: "Row 3 column 5, 2 adjacent mines", "Row 3 column 5, flagged", "Row 3 column 5, hidden". Opening a large blank region does not announce hundreds of cells — that would be unusable. Instead you read the board by moving through it, and a status region announces only what matters: game start, and the win or loss result.
For anyone who cannot use a mouse, this is a complete way to play: move to a square, read what it says, decide, act. It is slower than sighted mouse play, as any grid game is, but it is genuinely playable rather than nominally accessible.
How to win at Minesweeper
You win when every square without a mine is open. Flags are irrelevant to the win condition — you can finish with zero flags placed, or with every flag in the wrong place, as long as the safe squares are all open.
Practically, winning consistently means: open a corner, expand the blank region, apply the two counting rules until they stop yielding, then use subset subtraction, then use the global mine count in the endgame, and only then guess — as early as possible and at the best available odds.
Your statistics
The game keeps games played, games won, win rate, best time, current streak and best streak — separately for each difficulty, because an Expert best time next to a Beginner one is meaningless. All of it is stored in your browser's local storage on this device only. Nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and no other device or person can see it. Clearing your browser data clears it, and there is a Clear statistics button with a confirmation if you want to reset deliberately.
Privacy
The entire game runs in your browser. Board generation, mine placement, your clicks, your times and your statistics never leave your device — there is no server component to send them to. You can verify it: open your browser's developer tools, switch to the Network tab, and play a full game. You will see the page's own files load once and nothing after that.
The only thing stored is a single local-storage entry holding your statistics and your zoom preference. Details are in our privacy policy.
More games and tools
If you like Minesweeper's flavour of pure deduction, Sudoku is the closest relative on the site — same "prove it before you place it" discipline, no hidden information at all. For something faster, 2048 and Snake are one-hand games that work well on a phone, and Tic Tac Toe is the quickest possible reset between Minesweeper attempts.