Minesweeper

What Is Minesweeper?

Minesweeper is a single-player logic puzzle played on a rectangular grid. A fixed number of mines is hidden under the cells. Reveal a cell and one of three things happens: it is a mine and the game ends, it shows a number from 1 to 8 telling you exactly how many of its eight neighboring cells hide a mine, or it is blank, meaning no mine touches it at all. Blank cells cascade, opening every connected blank cell and the numbered border around them in a single click.

You win by revealing every cell that is not a mine. You never have to click the mines themselves, and you do not have to flag them either: flags are a bookkeeping tool for you, not a win condition. Everything needed to solve the board is printed on the board itself, which puts Minesweeper closer to Sudoku or a nonogram than to an arcade game.

From an OS/2 Side Project to Every Windows PC

The game most people remember was written at Microsoft around 1989 to 1990. Curt Johnson wrote a version for OS/2 and Robert Donner ported it to Windows, where it first shipped in the Microsoft Entertainment Pack in 1990. Two years later it was bundled with Windows 3.1, and from there it traveled onto essentially every office and school computer of the decade through Windows 95, 98, 2000 and XP.

The often-repeated explanation for why Microsoft shipped it is that the bundled games were quietly teaching mouse skills to a generation that had only used a keyboard: Solitaire taught drag-and-drop, Minesweeper taught precise clicking and the existence of the right mouse button. It was dropped from the default Windows install in Windows 8 in 2012 and replaced by a store app with ads and animations, which is a large part of why people go looking for the plain silver version online.

The concept predates Microsoft: Mined-Out on the ZX Spectrum in 1983 and Relentless Logic for DOS in 1985 both had you crossing a hidden minefield using proximity counts. What the Windows version added was the whole grid being visible at once, so the puzzle is never about exploration, only deduction. This site keeps that version intact, down to the silver bevels, the LCD mine counter and the smiley reset button: play classic Windows Minesweeper in its original look.

The Two Rules That Solve Most Boards

If a number touches exactly as many hidden cells as its own value, every one of those cells is a mine. If a number already has that many flags around it, every other cell it touches is safe. Alternating between those two statements clears the majority of any grid, and once a number is satisfied a click (or double-click) on it opens all its remaining neighbors at once.

For the full walkthrough with an interactive board, read the complete guide to how to play Minesweeper. When you want to stop counting cell by cell, work through the Minesweeper pattern atlas, which collects the number arrangements that have exactly one possible solution.

The Three Classic Difficulties

The standard boards have not changed since the 1990s. What separates them is not just size but mine density, the share of cells that hide a mine, and density is what actually decides how a board feels to play.

Beginner is the gentlest of the three and its low density means large openings: one good click often clears a third of the grid. Intermediate raises density by roughly a quarter, enough that you stop solving one region and start juggling several frontiers at once. Expert puts a mine under one cell in five, so cascades are small and the border between revealed and hidden cells stays long for most of the game. If none of the three fits, custom Minesweeper boards run from a 5x5 warm-up to a 50x50 marathon.

What Makes a Good First Click

Your first click cannot lose. Mines are placed after it and the cell you clicked plus its neighbors are kept clear, so the opening move always reveals a blank cell and cascades. Where you spend that free roll matters: click somewhere central rather than in a corner. An interior cell has eight neighbors, an edge cell five and a corner three, so a central opening has far more room to spread and hands you a bigger region with a longer numbered border to read. A corner opening frequently leaves you with a single 1 and nothing to deduce from.

Logic, Not Luck

Minesweeper looks like a gambling game to anyone watching over your shoulder, and it is not. Once the mines are dealt the board is fixed and every clue is visible. Most losses happen because a player clicked a cell whose safety had not been proven while a provably safe cell sat somewhere else on the board.

Genuinely unavoidable guesses do exist. They appear when two hidden cells are interchangeable as far as every visible number is concerned, and they get more common as density rises: rare on Beginner, a recurring feature of Expert endgames. Even then, counting the mines you have left against the cells that could hold them resolves a surprising number of positions that look like coin flips. The habit that separates good players from lucky ones is simple: before every click, be able to say the sentence that proves the cell is safe.

If forced guesses are the part you hate, open no-guess Minesweeper, or tick No-guess board on a custom board. Every board it deals has been played through by a solver first, so a loss is always a mistake you can find. The boards on this page stay random, because their times go on the leaderboard.

Desktop and Mobile Controls

On a desktop or laptop, left-click reveals, right-click flags and a click (or double-click) on a satisfied number chords it. Chording is why experienced players look so fast: instead of opening five cells one by one, they flag the mines around a number and clear the rest in a single motion.

On a phone or tablet, tap to reveal and long-press to flag. The board scales to your screen width, so Beginner and Intermediate read comfortably on a phone held upright, while Expert is 30 cells wide and much easier in landscape or on a tablet. If you play at night, the dark mode version of the board keeps the classic number colors without the glare of the silver chrome.

Daily Challenge, Streaks and Personal Bests

The daily Minesweeper challenge generates one board a day from a seed based on the date, so every player gets the same mine layout. You have a single attempt per difficulty, which changes how you play: with no restarts, a risky click is a real decision rather than a free reroll. Finishing gives you a spoiler-free result to share, and consecutive days build a streak.

Your best times for each difficulty are recorded on the times and results leaderboard, stored in your browser rather than on an account. Almost everyone shaves a large chunk off their Intermediate time in the first week simply by learning to chord.

Free, Unblocked and Embeddable

This is a static page with the game running as a small script in your browser. Nothing is installed and no account is created, which is why it usually works on locked-down school and work machines and on Chromebooks where installers are blocked; the unblocked Minesweeper pages cover the cases people ask about most: playing at school, at work, on a Chromebook, on a phone and with no download at all. Teachers will find a ready-made lesson on the Minesweeper for teachers page. Anyone building a logic or probability lesson can drop the board into their own site with the Minesweeper embed generator, which produces an iframe snippet with the difficulty preset of your choice.