Classic Mine Sweeper: Easy, Medium & Hard Minesweeper

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Alternatively kids and adults can play this mine finding game for free as a web application .

Classic Mine Sweeper Game for Kids Game Play Instructions

• Starting the Game
  • Click on the difficulty level you wish to play to start your game.
    • Easy: The playing field is a 9×9 grid (81 squares) with 20 mines hidden in it. Just under 1 in 4 squares has a mine.
    • Medium: The playing field is a 10×12 grid (120 squares) with 40 mines hidden in it. 1 in 3 squares has a mine.
    • Hard: The playing field is a 12×14 grid (168 squares) with 80 mines hidden in it. Just under 1 in 2 squares has a mine.
    • The difficulty level of this game increases geometrically across difficulty levels. Easy is quite so, medium is reasonable, and hard is masochistic.
      • On hard mode you often end up creating walls of flags & the problem with that is a flag does not yield any information about what is beyond the flags on the other side.
      • As a kicker, about half the squares are bombs, so not only are you reduced to making opening guesses repeatedly, but each guess has about a 50% chance of blowing up.
  • The welcome screen also has a button for game play info in the upper left corner and a sound control button in the upper right corner.
• Game Controls
  • Desktop
    • Quickly tap on a square using the mouse left click to uncover it.
    • Use the mouse left click to select a square and hold it to flag a square.
      • You can also long click a flagged square to remove the flag.
  • Touchscreen
    • Use your finger like a mouse.
  • The top of the playing field shows how long you have played and how many mines remain based on your flag count.
  • The game has a menu select button in the upper left corner for restarting a game and a sound control button in the upper right corner.
• Minesweeper Game Strategy
  • You win the game when all the squares without mines are opened up & you lose if you click on a mine.
    • Some minesweeper games require you to flag all mines but not clear all empty squares to win.
    • This game requires all empty squares be uncovered.
    • You can win this game when all empty squares are uncovered even if some mines have not yet been flagged.
  • This strategy advice presumes you are playing on easy or medium. I figure if you select hard mode you are probably better at this game than I am 😀
  • Off the start the game is a game of random guessing until you get the field to open up.
    • I generally like to guess close to the center of the screen so I have many directions to work from & expand out toward.
    • Most games have unavoidable guesses. Try to choose the guesses with the best odds of success if you are forced to make one.
  • When you do get the field to open up a bit try to place a flag where you are certain there is a mine then use the math from the adjacent squares to further open up the playing field & further place flags.
    • If an opened square has no numbers on it that means there are no adjacent bonds (across, vertical, or diagonal).
    • An uncovered cell with no number in it tells you the nearest mine is at least 2 squares away.
    • If a square has a 1 on it and you have a correctly placed flag next to it you can open up the other adjacent cells.
    • You can use the math of multiple overlapping grids to determine where many mines are. One square number might tell you that X Y or Z has a mine without you knowing which one has one. The number on an adjacent square may make it certain that Y is a bomb or Z is not one.
  • Conveying information
    • Outside of a row of many consecutive mines most central squares share a significant amount of information about the potential placement of nearby mines.
    • Edge pieces that are not corners lack 3 of 8 adjacent pieces (which would be on the other side of the playing field). Corner pieces lack 5 of the 8 adjacent pieces, which makes them infer less information and often leads one to needing to guess.
  • In some cases you have to make unavoidable guesses.
    • If you are forced to guess try to guess in an area where you have the best odds of success.
    • For example, picking a square where you know only 1 in 3 are likely to be a bomb is better than 1 in 2 odds or 2 to 1 against you.
    • Or if the odds of a square being a bomb are quite high you can flag it and then see what other neighboring squares you can open based on the assumption your flag was correct.
• Target Audience
  • This game is fun for all ages & should help kids improve their logic and math skills, though playing on the difficult level should be reserved for older kids and adults since about half the squares are mines.
  • There are no adult themes in the game.

Random Minesweeper Trivia

• Minesweeper originated out of the post World War 2 computer movement.
• The founder of this site had a grandfather who worked on a mine sweeping submarine in World War 2.
• Jerimac Ratliff’s created the Minesweeper ancestor game Cube in 1973.
• Microsoft originally released Minesweeper as part of the Windows 3.1 operating system, which was initially released on April 6, 1992.
• Minesweeper can be played using various cell shapes beyond squares including triangles, hexagon, irregular shapes, and 3D forms.
• For April fools day in 2015 Minecraft added a game called Minescreeper where players must avoid the hidden Creepers.
• Richard Kaye published a proof in 2000 proving the game is co-NP-complete. In 2007 he also proved infinite Minesweeper is Turing-complete.
• The game has a phase transition where the odds of success fall dramatically as more cells are saturated with mines. If over 25% of squares are mined solving a board requires an exponentially-unlikely set of mine guesses.

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CardGames.pro published this Minesweeper on August 9, 2021