Minesweeper is a logic puzzle video game genre generally played on personal computers. The game features a grid of clickable tiles, with hidden "mines" (depicted as naval mines in the original game) scattered throughout the board. The objective is to clear the board without detonating any mines, with help from clues about the number of neighboring mines in each field. Variants of Minesweeper have been made that expand on the basic concepts, such as Minesweeper X, Crossmines, and Minehunt. Minesweeper has been incorporated as a minigame in other games, such as RuneScape and Minecraft 2015 April Fools update.
The origin of Minesweeper is unclear. According to TechRadar, the first version of the game was 1990's Microsoft Minesweeper, but Eurogamer says Mined-Out by Ian Andrew (1983) was the first Minesweeper game. Curt Johnson, the creator of Microsoft Minesweeper, acknowledges that his game's design was borrowed from another game, but it was not Mined-Out, and he does not remember which game it is.
Gameplay
In Minesweeper, hidden mines are scattered throughout a board, which is divided into cells. Cells have multiple possible states:
Unopened tiles (cover the board at the start of the game, can also be made by removing flags) Numbered tiles (can show 1-8) Blank tiles (no mines are on the diagonal/adjacent to the tile) Flagged tiles (right-clicking an unopened tile) (?) Question marked tiles (right-clicking a flagged tile; only exists in certain implementations)
An unopened cell is blank and clickable, while an opened cell is exposed. Flagged cells are unopened cells marked by the player to indicate a potential mine location; some implementations make flagged cells unopenable to reduce the risk of uncovering a suspected mine.
A player selects a cell to open it. If a player opens a cell containing a mine, the game ends in a loss. Otherwise, the opened cell displays either a number, indicating the number of mines diagonally and/or adjacent to it, or a blank tile (sometimes shown as a 0), and all adjacent cells will automatically be opened. This may cause a chain reaction; any blank tiles opened by other blank tiles open the surrounding tiles too. Players can also flag a cell, visualised by a flag being put on the tile, to denote that they believe a mine to be in that place. Flagged cells are still considered unopened, and may be unflagged. In some versions of the game, when the number of adjacent mines is equal to the number of adjacent flagged cells, all adjacent non-flagged unopened cells can be opened by both left and right-clicking (regardless of if any tiles are mines or not), a process known as chording.
Objective and strategy
A game of Minesweeper begins when the player first selects a cell on a board. The first click is guaranteed to be safe, whilst some variants further guarantee that all adjacent cells are safe as well. During the game, the player uses information given from the opened cells to deduce further cells that are safe to open, iteratively gaining more information to solve the board. The player is also given the number of remaining mines in the board, known as the minecount, which is calculated as the total number of mines subtracted by the number of flagged cells (thus the minecount can be negative if too many flags have been placed).
To win a game of Minesweeper, all non-mine cells must be opened without opening a mine. There is no score, however there is a timer recording the time taken to finish the game. Difficulty can be increased by adding mines or starting with a larger grid. Most variants of Minesweeper that are not played on a fixed board offer three default board configurations, usually known as Beginner, Intermediate, and Expert, in order of increasing difficulty. Beginner is usually on an 8x8 or 9x9 board containing 10 mines, Intermediate is usually on a 16x16 board with 40 mines and expert is usually on a 30x16 board with 99 mines, however there is usually an option to customise board size and mine count.