A little funky guide to playing Minesweeper
This is a post that I wrote a long, long time ago, but completely forgot its existence until today. Sorry for that!
I wrote this tutorial as a general introduction to people who never played Minesweeper before to the game.
Hope you enjoy! :3
Image generated by Stable Diffusion -- Poster drawing for Minesweeper, pixel art
Table of content
Introduction
Hello there!
You clicked on the title probably because you wanted to learn how to play Minesweeper, or wondering why the hell a game like Minesweeper need a guide to play.
And about a year ago, I thought of the same too! I thought that Mineswepper is a simple game, you don't need a guide to be good at it, right?
But as it turns out, there's more to the game than what it might seem. And now I'm sharing all of my knowledge to you in this post.
So, buckle up, buckaroos. Today we are going to dive into the wonderful game that is Minesweeper, and learn some of the most important concepts in the game.
Hope you enjoy! :3
Where to play
Before jumping into the meat, we are going to answer an easy, but very reasonable qustion: where am I going to practice and play?
The answer is: Anywhere, really!
You can play Minesweeper on your older Windows machine or on your phone (though not very recommended).
if you want a little bit more than just playing games, there are online Minesweeper servers, like minesweeper.online, that provides a lot goods and tutorials.
Generally speaking, if your device has Minesweeper and can run it, by any means use it.
How to play
In contrary to what you (and many people) might think, Minesweeper is a very simple game to play and to understand.
You were given a grid of cells, and each cell can contain either an empty space, a number, or a mine.
Cell with numbers indicate the amount of mines in their 9 neighbouring cells.
To finish the game, you need to explore all the spaces in the grid, until there's only the mine cells left.
And... that's it! Now you know how to play Minesweeper!
Juat that?
Yes, just that! :)
Now, you have got the basic idea of how to play, let's move on to...
Chording
Chording is a very important technique that every beginners should know about when playing the sweeping mines game.
It is also the only way that you can gain efficiency (which we will talk about later).
Chording happens when you left-click on a number cell after all of the mine cells near it have been flagged.
This results in all other cells being cleared out, allow you to save clicks and time.
Note: On Windows Minesweeper, you can chord by left- and right-click on the cell at the same time
Note that depends on the amount of flags needed and the amount of cells that can be cleared, chording can be used in certain situations to gain efficiency.
A lot of the times they don't save any more clicks than just clear out the cells one by one, then it's a personal preference to use or not to use.
Note: Not all Minesweeper implementations support chording, and If the implementation of your choice doesn't support it, you may want to move to another one
Patterns
One thing that's just as important as chording is learning and recognizing patterns.
Patterns in Minesweeper (sometimes called configurations) are common arrangement of numbers that only has 1 solution.
There are quite a lot of patterns in the game. Some are extemely common, while others are more rare and complicated.
You don't have to learn all of them, though, but it's essential for you to know these 4 patterns, as they are very common, and can help you solve seemingly unsolvable cases:
- The 1-1 pattern is used to solve a row of 1s. The mine is contained in one of the two cells in yellow, and the third cell next to it can be opened
Here's another, similar, example:
The 1-2-1 pattern is one of the most common patterns, and also very easy to solve: The cells above the 1s both contain a mine, and the cell in the middle of them can be opened
Note that with this pattern, you can be a bit more efficient by only flag one of the cells and chord on that 1 to open the cell between two mines and the cell next to the mine cell at the same time.
- The 2-3-2 pattern is also an extremely common pattern. The cells next to the pattern are guarantted to have a mine, other cells are safe
- The 1 Hole is a pattern that usually comes after the row of 1s case. Since one of two of the mines next the 1 above contain one mine, all of the cells above it are safe.
Efficiency
In Minesweeper, the difficulty of a board is measured by a unit called Bentel's Benchmark Board Value, or 3BV for short.
3BV is the minimum amount of clicks required to solve a board without using flags (or NF, for short).
To gain efficiency, you have to solve the board such that the amount of clicks is smaller than the 3BV of the board.
One way to do this is to basically be careful and not chord unncessarily, as it can cost you clicks.
But you also shouldn't go for the raw no flag way (aka opening every single non-mine cell), as it is incresibly inefficient, and the game kinda does it for you at the end anyways.
Luck
Minesweeper is, like Rubik's cube and Tetris, a game relied heavily on luck.
But here, we are not talking about the luck of a board, but rather luck on a specific cell setup.
There are setups where the chances are 50/50, and you can't solve these with logic or patterns.
A rule of thumb for dealing with situations like this is to check the mine count and compare it with your configuration (i.e. the mine pattern you have in your mind).
My personal advice for this is to just go with your intuition. There's a very likely chance that once your skills get decently good, your predictions will also be just as good.
End
So, that's the end of this guide!
I have introduced to you some of the most important and fundamental concepts for playing Minesweeper.
Hope this will provide you helpful tips and advices for playing the game.
Now, fire up the Minesweeper software on your machine, and have fun sweeping! :)
TL;DR
- Minesweeper is a game that is easy to play, but hard to master
- You can play Minesweeper on pretty much anywhere, but through computer is the most recommended
- Minesweeper has a very simple game rule: Cells with numbers tell us the amount of mines in its 9 neighbouring cells. Clear all of the cells until there's only the mine cells left
- Chording (Left-click on the number cells after you have found all of the mines near it) is an important technique that everyone playing the game should know
- There are many patterns (common arrangement of numbers that only has 1 solution), but the 4 most common are: 1-1 Pattern, 1-2-1 Pattern, 2-3-2 Pattern, and the 1 Hole
- To gain efficiency, you have to solve the board in less clicks than the 3BV value of the board (the minimum amount of clicks required to solve a board without using flags)
- There are certain setups that can't be solved with logic or patterns. It's usually best to go with your intuition or use the mine count to determine if the configuration you have in your mind is right