How to play Minesweeper
Play minesweeper free online. Beginner, intermediate and expert boards, each checked by a solver so you can finish by logic with no 50/50 coin flip.
The rules, step by step
- 1Pick a size. Beginner is 9x9 with 10 mines, intermediate is 16x16 with 40, and expert is 30x16 with 99.
- 2Click or tap any square to start. The board marks one guaranteed-safe opening square, and your first move always opens that square and the clearing around it — so you can never lose on move one.
- 3An opened square shows a number: how many of the eight squares touching it contain mines. A blank square touches none, so all of its neighbours open automatically.
- 4When you are sure a square holds a mine, flag it. Right-click on a desktop; on a phone, press and hold for about half a second, or switch on flag mode and tap.
- 5The counter at the top shows mines minus flags, so it tells you how many you still have to find. The clock starts on your first opened square.
- 6Once a number has all of its mines flagged, click the number itself to open every remaining neighbour in one go. This is called chording and it is how fast players clear a board.
- 7Open a mine and the round ends: every mine is revealed, the one you hit is marked in red, and any flag in the wrong place is crossed out.
- 8You win when every square that is not a mine has been opened. You do not need to flag anything to win — flags are a note to yourself.
Strategy that actually helps
- Learn the 1-2-1 pattern. Three numbers reading 1-2-1 in a row along a wall of unopened squares means the two squares under the 1s are mines and the square under the 2 is safe. It comes up constantly and it resolves instantly.
- Learn 1-2-2-1 as well. Along a straight edge of unopened squares, the two squares under the 2s are mines and the squares under the 1s are safe. Together with 1-2-1, these two shapes account for a large fraction of every board you will ever open.
- Use the subtraction trick on overlapping numbers. If a 2 and a 1 share all but one of their unknown squares, that extra square must be a mine — one number needs a mine the other cannot account for. This is the single most useful habit to build, because it works everywhere and needs no pattern recognition.
- Count the frontier at the end. The mine counter is a real clue: if the numbers along your frontier already account for every mine left, then every square out in the untouched territory is safe and you can open the lot. The mirror case is just as useful — if the frontier cannot possibly hold them all, the leftovers are all mines.
- Chord only when the flags are right. Chording opens every unflagged neighbour at once, so it trusts your flags completely. On a number where you placed a flag on a hunch rather than a proof, chording will end the game instantly. Chord on numbers you flagged from certainty.
- Work the edges and corners first. A square on the edge has five neighbours instead of eight and a corner has three, so the same number carries far more information there. When you stall in the middle, go and look at the walls.
- When you get stuck on a no-guess board, the deduction exists — you have missed it. Walk the frontier one number at a time and check each against its neighbours rather than staring at the square you want to open.
About Minesweeper
Minesweeper is a counting puzzle in disguise. Every number you uncover tells you exactly how many mines touch that square, and the whole game is the business of stitching those small local facts into one big consistent picture. The board never lies and never hides anything: by the time you have a handful of numbers open, the answer to "is this square safe" is usually already sitting there in plain sight, waiting for you to notice that the 2 in the corner and the 1 next to it cannot both be satisfied any other way.
The thing that ruins that experience is the guess. Most minesweeper implementations drop mines at random and serve the board, which means roughly one game in three ends with a genuine coin flip — two squares, one mine, no information anywhere on the grid that can separate them. You did nothing wrong and you lose half the time. Every deal on this page is generated differently: after the mines are scattered, a solver runs over the board using only deductions that are certain, and the board is only kept if that solver can clear the entire grid. If it stalls, the generator moves a mine out of the spot that stalled it and tries again, and if enough repairs fail it starts over from a fresh scatter.
The solver deliberately knows only the rules a person actually uses. It applies the single-cell rules first — a number with all its mines flagged means every other neighbour is safe, and a number with exactly as many unknown neighbours as missing mines means all of them are mines. Then it applies the subset rule between overlapping numbers, which is the machinery behind the 1-2-1 and 1-2-2-1 patterns experienced players recognise on sight. Finally it counts: the mine counter in the corner is information, and when the mines still to be found are all accounted for by the numbers on the frontier, every square away from the frontier is safe. Nothing in that list is a probability estimate. If the solver finishes, a human can finish, which is the whole claim.
Boards that pass carry a small "no guess" badge. Boards that hit the generator's attempt cap — which happens occasionally on expert, where 99 mines in 480 squares leaves very little slack — are served without the badge, and the board tells you that a guess may be needed. Three sizes are available: beginner at 9x9 with 10 mines for a sixty-second round, intermediate at 16x16 with 40 mines which is the sweet spot for most players, and expert at 30x16 with 99 mines, the size every world record is set on. Flagging works properly on a phone too: hold a square for a moment to flag it, or flip on flag mode and tap.
Variants and how they differ
Beginner
9x9, 10 mines — about a minute.
Intermediate
16x16, 40 mines — the everyday board.
Expert
30x16, 99 mines — the record size.
Minesweeper questions
Do I ever have to guess?
Not on a board carrying the no-guess badge. That badge means a solver restricted to certain deductions — single-cell rules, the subset rule between overlapping numbers, and whole-board mine counting — cleared the entire grid from the marked safe opening. If it stalls, you missed something rather than needing luck. Boards that hit the generator's attempt cap ship without the badge and say so, because claiming otherwise would be dishonest.
What are the standard difficulty sizes?
Beginner is 9 by 9 with 10 mines, intermediate is 16 by 16 with 40 mines, and expert is 30 wide by 16 tall with 99 mines. These are the original Windows numbers and every minesweeper record list still uses them, so a time here is comparable to a time anywhere else.
How do I flag a mine on a phone?
Two ways, both of which work. Press and hold a square for about half a second and it flags without opening, or tap the flag-mode button so every tap places a flag instead of opening a square. Flag mode leaves chording intact, so you can still tap a satisfied number to open its neighbours.
What is chording?
Clicking a number that already has the right count of flags around it, which opens all of its remaining neighbours in a single action. It is the main speed technique in minesweeper. It is only as safe as your flags: chord a number whose flags were a guess and you will detonate whatever was actually underneath.
Is the first click always safe?
Yes, and more than safe — the opening square is chosen before the mines are placed and kept clear along with all eight of its neighbours, so the first move always opens into a large cascade rather than a lone number. The board marks that square in green, and your first move opens it wherever you click, which is both what the no-guess proof assumes and the only behaviour that does not accidentally tell you where a mine is.
Why is expert harder to generate without guesses?
Expert packs 99 mines into 480 squares, a density around 20 percent, which leaves the generator very little room to move a mine somewhere harmless. Beginner and intermediate sit at roughly 12 and 16 percent and almost always come out clean. When expert cannot be made clean within the attempt cap, the board is served without the badge rather than the generator looping forever.
Is everyone playing the same board?
Every deal has a number, and the board is a pure function of that number and the difficulty, so sharing the deal number gives a friend the exact same mines. The daily challenge is simply the deal number that today's date hashes to, which is why the archive can serve any past day without storing anything.