How to Play

Tap any square to uncover it. Your very first tap is always safe — the mines are laid out after it lands, and never on the square you picked or the eight around it, so every game opens with a real area to read rather than a coin flip. An uncovered square shows a number: that is how many of its eight neighbours are mines. A blank square touches none, so the whole empty region around it opens at once. Long-press a square, or turn on FLAG mode and tap, to mark a mine you have worked out — a flagged square is locked and a stray tap cannot set it off. Once a number has all its mines flagged, tap the number itself to clear every remaining neighbour in one go. Clear every safe square to win; uncover a mine and the run ends. On a keyboard the arrows move the cursor, F flags, and Enter uncovers or clears.

Tips

• Work the edges and corners first. A corner square has three neighbours instead of eight, so a 1 in a corner narrows things down far faster than a 1 in open ground. The same goes for any number sitting against the wall of an area you have already cleared — fewer unknowns means fewer possibilities to rule out.
• Learn the 1-2-1 pattern along a straight edge and you will stop guessing on half the boards you play. Three numbers reading 1, 2, 1 in a row, with three unknown squares beneath them, always means mine, safe, mine — in that order, every time, no arithmetic needed.
• Flag a mine and then tap the numbers around it straight away. Once a number's mine count is satisfied, tapping the number itself clears all its remaining neighbours at once, which is much faster than picking them off one at a time — and each of those new squares gives you another number to read.
• Flags earn you nothing. Score comes only from squares you actually uncover, multiplied by the difficulty, with a bonus for clearing the board and finishing quickly. Your score is banked every tenth of the way in, so a board you lose three-quarters of the way through still keeps everything you had earned up to that point.

Behind this game

Flagging thirty safe squares and stepping on a mine on purpose used to score 898 — the fastest way to score was to lose.

Read how I fixed it — a devlog by Neeraj Kotwani, who builds every game here.

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