About This Site
Why this exists
Search "how to play Minesweeper" and you get a step-by-step post with stock screenshots, a Reddit thread titled some variation of "how the hell do I play this," and a few videos. None of them explain the part people actually get stuck on.
The stuck part is never the rules. The rules fit in a sentence: numbers count adjacent mines, don't click a mine. What's missing is everything after that — where to click first and why it matters, what to do when the board seems to offer no safe move, whether the position you're staring at is genuinely unsolvable or you just missed something.
That last question is the one that makes people quit. They assume they're bad at the game. Often the board was unwinnable and no one ever told them that was possible.
This site is an attempt to answer those questions properly.
The game is ours
The board on the home page is written from scratch — roughly 500 lines of plain JavaScript, no libraries, no embedded third-party game, no iframe pointing at someone else's site.
That was a deliberate choice, and it costs more than embedding would have. But it means:
- We can explain it truthfully. The how it works page describes real code — the actual mine placement routine, the actual flood fill. If we'd embedded someone else's game, that page would be guesswork about a black box.
- We control the behaviour. First-click protection excludes the clicked cell *and* its eight neighbours, so your opening click always cascades into a usable region instead of stranding you on a lone
4. That's a decision we could only make by owning the code. - It works on a phone. Long-press to flag, tap a revealed number to chord. Most Minesweeper implementations on the web are desktop ports where right-click has no touch equivalent.
- It's keyboard accessible. Arrow keys move, Space or Enter opens, F flags. Cells carry ARIA labels with their coordinates and state, and wins and losses are announced through a live region. Minesweeper is a grid of buttons — there's no good reason it should be mouse-only.
- No tracking in the game. It never phones home. Your board, your clicks, and your times stay in your browser.
What we're trying to get right
Being specific instead of vague. "Start in the corner" is advice you'll find anywhere. Why it works — a corner cell has 3 neighbours versus 8 in the middle, and walls constrain where mines can be, which is what makes deduction possible — is the part that's usually missing.
Being honest about luck. Minesweeper generates random boards and doesn't check they're solvable. Some positions are coin flips. Guides that imply perfect play wins every game are wrong, and that dishonesty is why people blame themselves for losses that weren't losable.
Showing the reasoning. The patterns on the strategy page are worked through step by step, with the contradiction that proves each one. We also verified them by brute force — enumerating every mine arrangement consistent with the clues — because a guide that confidently states a wrong deduction is worse than no guide.
Not padding. Each page has a job. The walkthrough narrates a first game. The rules are a lookup table. The strategy page is patterns. The engine page is for programmers. If something doesn't belong on a page, it isn't there.
Who writes this
A small team that plays a lot of Minesweeper and writes a lot of code. We got interested in the problem twice over — once as players trying to stop losing expert boards, and once as programmers realising that "place 99 mines randomly but not there" is a genuinely more interesting problem than it first appears.
The technical page is the one we'd most like to be judged on. If you find an error in it, we'd like to know.
How the site is funded
Ads. That's it — no paid tier, no accounts, nothing to buy. The game and every guide are free and will stay that way. What advertising means for your privacy is spelled out in the privacy policy.
Corrections
If a deduction is wrong, a number is off, or the game misbehaves on your device, tell us: hello@minesweeperguide.com
Bug reports about the game are especially welcome — please include your browser and device. More on the contact page.