Minesweeper hides mines under a grid: each number counts the mines touching it, and you clear every safe cell by reading those numbers. Play Minesweeper free in your browser — no download, no account.
How You WinOpen every cell that is not a mine. Flags are your own notes: whether you place them, and whether they are right, has no effect on winning.
- Boards
- Beginner 9×9/10 · Intermediate 16×16/40 · Expert 30×16/99
- Deal
- Classic · No-guess · Fair
How a board starts
- Pick a board and a deal, and the grid is empty — no mines exist yet. Your first click is what the layout is built around.
- Beginner, Intermediate and Expert name sizes, not difficulties. They are the thirty-year-old standard, and world records are kept separately for each.
- The clock starts on your first click, not when the page loads. The counter top-left is mines minus flags; it can go negative, which just means you have placed more flags than there are mines.
Complete Rules
- An open cell shows how many mines sit in its eight neighbours, diagonals included. A cell with none shows nothing.
- Opening a cell with no adjacent mines opens its neighbours too, spreading until it reaches numbers. That region is an opening.
- Opening a mine ends the run: every remaining mine and every wrong flag is shown as it finishes.
- The first click is never a mine. The layout is generated from that click, so this is a property of the board rather than a rescue. Classic guarantees the clicked cell and nothing more.
- Right-click — long-press on a phone — flags a hidden cell or clears the flag. Flags are notes: the win condition is only that every safe cell is open. A flagged cell cannot be opened by a plain click.
- Chording: on an open number whose flag count equals the number, clicking it opens every unflagged hidden neighbour. It does not check whether the flags are right, so a wrong flag detonates. If the counts do not match, nothing happens.
- The counter shows total mines minus flags placed and may go negative. It is a counter, not a limit.
- 3BV is the fewest clicks that clear the board without flags: one per opening, plus every safe cell no opening reaches. 3BV over seconds is 3BV/s; 3BV over clicks is efficiency.
Boards and deals
- Beginner 9×9 with 10 mines: 12% density, a minute or two per game, the place to learn the shapes.
- Intermediate 16×16 with 40 mines: 16% density. Openings get rarer and boundary reading starts to bite.
- Expert 30×16 with 99 mines: 21% density, and the board the world records are set on — currently 29 seconds. It does not fit a narrow screen, so expect to shrink the cells or pan.
- Custom: 5–40 wide and 5–24 tall. No-guess and fair run a solver, so they cap at 30×20 and 25% density — outside that the game says the setup is unsupported rather than quietly dealing a classic board.
Your First Game
- Start in a corner. A corner has three neighbours, so it is the likeliest place to open a large area — and openings are where every deduction starts.
- Learn the two basic reads first: if a number has exactly that many hidden neighbours, they are all mines; if its mines are already accounted for, the rest are safe.
- When you cannot see the next step, ask for the explanation. It points at the area first, then names the technique, then highlights the evidence — read all of it to learn, or stop at the first layer for a nudge.
- Learn the 1-2 shapes. When two neighbouring numbers overlap, the cells they differ by can often be settled outright, and that is the most-used step past the basics.
- Count the mines you have left. This is the read beginners skip most often, and it is the most common reason a position that looks like a 50/50 turns out to have one answer.
- If you keep misclicking, make the cells bigger. The size control beside the board has seven steps and is remembered between games.
Practical Strategy
- For speed, place fewer flags. Every flag is a click. Place one only when you need it for a chord — the no-flag style that strong players use drops them entirely.
- Chording is the only source of efficiency. One chord opens three or more cells for two clicks; combine no-flag play with smart chording and efficiency goes past 100%.
- Work the boundary, not the whole grid. All the information lives on the border between the open area and the hidden one; nowhere else can tell you anything new until you open something.
- Stuck in one corner? Go and solve somewhere else. A local knot often unties itself once the mines elsewhere are pinned down — that is exactly what the remaining-mine count buys you.
- When you must guess, guess where the information is, not in the safest-looking corner. A cell that touches several numbers is far more likely to let you keep deducing.
- Expert does not fit a phone screen. Pick a cell size you can hit, then drag with one finger to pan — dragging never misfires, it cancels the click.
Winning and Special Rules
- Classic: uniform random mines, guaranteeing only that the first click is safe. This is the world-ranking deal and the only one whose times compare with the outside world. It can produce positions that require a guess.
- No-guess: verified at generation time, step by step, so the whole board can be read out from the first click with no guess anywhere. The first click therefore always opens an area. The solver that verifies the board is the same one that explains your next step — which is why a board here can never be advertised as solvable and then hand you a 50/50.
- Fair: mines are not fixed in advance. Guess when the board could have been read, and the cell you picked is a mine; guess when there was genuinely nothing to read, and you are safe. Numbers already on screen are never rewritten.
- No-guess comes in three depths: basic uses only the two simplest reads; advanced brings in the remaining mine count; expert allows positions that need the possible layouts enumerated.
- When you hit a mine, the result tells you which of four it was: that cell could be proven to be a mine, something else was provably safe, so the guess was avoidable, nothing at all could be proven, or too early to read anything.
- Cell size has seven steps from 12px to 48px plus a fit-to-screen option. It is a display preference, never a rule change, and it is remembered between games. Steps under 24px are smaller than the recommended target size, and the control says so.
- Progress is kept on this device. Close the tab and come back and the board, flags and clock return; nothing is uploaded and nothing syncs across devices.
Common Mistakes
- Treating flags as the win condition. The win is every safe cell opened; you can win with no flags at all, and speed players do.
- Chording without checking the flags. A chord fires on the flag count alone, so one wrong flag detonates it instantly. This is how experienced players lose.
- Forgetting the mine counter. Most of the community's "is this a 50/50?" screenshots have the same answer: finish elsewhere, then count what is left.
- Calling two cells a 50/50 on sight. A real one needs the board to offer nothing at all. Ask for an explanation first — it will say plainly whether anything can be proven.
- Gambling in no-guess mode. Every step there has an answer, and a lucky guess teaches you to click when you are stuck. That habit is expensive back on a classic board.
- Clicking blind on a phone. Your finger covers the target. Pressing highlights the cell you are about to open, so look before you lift — and if it is the wrong one, slide away to cancel.
How hard is Minesweeper
Most players clear a classic Expert board only a few percent of the time, and that number is two things at once: the reading is genuinely hard, and a classic board can require a guess you cannot win. That second half is the reason no-guess mode exists.
Measured here on randomly generated boards: about 80% of Beginner boards can be cleared with the two most basic reads alone; adding the remaining-mine count takes it to 88%; enumerating possible layouts takes it to 90%. Intermediate goes 59% → 66% → 70%. In other words counting the mines you have left is worth six or seven points on its own — more than any shape-recognition trick, and it is the step players skip.
The last 10% of Beginner boards — 30% of Intermediate — are the ones that truly need a guess. No-guess mode's whole job is to filter those out before you see them: it generates and verifies repeatedly until it has a board that reads all the way through.
Minesweeper FAQ
Is Minesweeper luck or skill?
A classic board is both: nearly every cell can be worked out, but positions that genuinely require a guess do exist. For pure deduction, use no-guess mode — every board there is verified solvable from the first click to the last.
What is a 50/50, and is it really unwinnable?
It is a position where two cells must hold one mine between them and the board gives you nothing to tell them apart. On a classic board that is a coin flip. But most positions that look like one are not — the usual reason is that the remaining mine count has not been counted in. When you are stuck, ask for the explanation: it will tell you which of the two you are in.
What is chording?
When an open number already has that many flags around it, clicking the number opens every remaining neighbour at once. It is the main way to cut your click count, and it is the only thing that raises efficiency. It performs no safety check: if a flag is wrong, the chord detonates.
Can the first click be a mine?
No. The layout is generated after you click, and that cell is guaranteed clear. Classic mode guarantees that one cell only, so opening a number rather than a blank area is normal. No-guess mode is stronger: the first click always opens an area.
What do 3BV and efficiency mean?
3BV is the smallest number of clicks that clears the board without flags — it measures how much work the board actually is. Efficiency is 3BV divided by the clicks you spent. Chording pushes it above 100%; flags and wasted clicks pull it down.