Touch Controls
A phone has no right mouse button, so the board reads your finger in three ways:
- Tap a hidden cell to dig it. Your first tap is always safe.
- Press and hold a hidden cell for under half a second to place or remove a flag. Where the browser supports it, the phone gives a short buzz when the flag goes down.
- Tap a number whose mines are all flagged to open every other cell around it at once. This is chording, and on a phone it saves the most taps.
Holding is slow and easy to fumble on a dense board, so phones and tablets also get a Dig / Flag switch under the board. Set it to Flag and every tap on a hidden cell plants or lifts a flag instead of digging. Numbers still chord in Flag mode, so a quick rhythm is: switch to Flag, mark the mines you are sure of, tap the satisfied numbers to open around them, then switch back to Dig for fresh ground.
The board ignores a finger that slides, so scrolling the page does not dig a cell by accident, and a second finger on the board cancels the press, so pinching to zoom does not dig either. If you start a press on the wrong cell, slide your finger away before letting go.
Which Boards Fit a Phone
The cells are sized to the width of your screen, down to a minimum that is still comfortable to hit with a finger. Beginner (9x9, 10 mines) fits any phone held upright with room to spare, and it is the board the page starts on. Intermediate (16x16, 40 mines) sits right at the edge: the cells stop shrinking at that finger-sized minimum, so on many phones held upright the board is slightly wider than the screen and scrolls sideways a little. Turned to landscape, or on a larger phone, it fits. The smaller cells also make holding to flag fiddly, which is where Flag mode earns its place.
Expert (30x16, 99 mines) is a landscape board. Held upright, it is wider than the screen and scrolls sideways, so turn the phone or play it on a tablet. A phone screen is tall rather than wide, which suits a custom Minesweeper board better: set a narrow, tall size such as 9 wide and 16 high, and the whole board fits upright with cells you can still hit.
Add It to Your Home Screen
You do not need an app store to give Minesweeper an icon. The site can be saved to your home screen, and from there it opens full screen, without the browser's address bar, which leaves more room for the board.
- iPhone and iPad: open the page in Safari, tap the Share button and choose Add to Home Screen.
- Android: open the page in Chrome, tap the three-dot menu and choose Add to Home screen or Install app; the wording depends on the Chrome version.
After one visit with a connection, the main boards also play offline, from the icon or from a normal tab, so a tunnel or a flight does not end the game. Your times are saved on the phone. On iPhone and iPad, the home-screen icon can keep a record of its own, separate from the one in Safari, so pick one way of opening the game and stick to it. An optional account syncs your record between devices.
On School or Work Wi-Fi
A phone on a school or company Wi-Fi network goes through the same web filter as a laptop. The page itself needs nothing that filters typically block: no app, no plugin, no login and no ads. But if the network has filed this site under games, it will not load there, and many schools have their own rules about phones in class. Both are decisions to respect. The guide to Minesweeper at school explains how school filters decide what to block.