Buscaminas

Minesweeper is one of the most iconic computer puzzles ever created. The player is presented with a grid of covered cells, some of which contain hidden mines. By uncovering cells, the player reveals numbers indicating how many mines are in the eight surrounding cells. Using these numerical clues and logical deduction, the player must uncover all safe cells without triggering a mine. The goal is to clear the entire board or, in some versions, to flag all mines.

Rules

1. The grid starts fully covered. A fixed number of mines are hidden beneath the cells.
2. Click (or tap) a cell to reveal it. If it contains a mine, the game is over.
3. If a revealed cell is safe, it displays a number from 0 to 8, indicating how many of its eight neighboring cells contain mines.
4. Cells with 0 adjacent mines are blank and automatically reveal their neighbors (cascade).
5. The player can flag cells they believe contain mines (right-click or long-press).
6. The game is won when all non-mine cells are revealed.
7. The first click is always safe (the board is generated or adjusted after the first click).

Common Grid Sizes

• Beginner: 9x9 grid with 10 mines.
• Intermediate: 16x16 grid with 40 mines.
• Expert: 30x16 grid with 99 mines.

Strategies

• Basic Counting: If a numbered cell has exactly that many flagged neighbors, all remaining covered neighbors are safe. If the number equals the count of covered neighbors, they are all mines.
• 1-1 Pattern: When two adjacent "1" cells share a border, and one has an identified mine, the constraint propagates to determine the other's safe cells.
• 1-2 Pattern: A "1" next to a "2" along an edge creates specific mine placement constraints that experienced players recognize instantly.
• Subtraction: Compare the numbers on two adjacent cells. The difference tells you about the cells that one sees but the other doesn't.
• Edge Analysis: Cells along the boundary of the revealed area carry the most information. Focus on these frontier cells.
• Probability (when logic fails): In some board configurations, pure logic cannot determine all cells. Advanced players estimate mine probabilities for the remaining covered cells and click the safest option.

Minesweeper's origins trace back to the 1960s and 1970s, when mainframe computers hosted simple mine-finding games. The earliest known ancestor is "Cube," created by Jerimac Ratliff in the early 1960s, which involved navigating a grid while avoiding hidden hazards.

The direct precursor to modern Minesweeper was "Mined-Out," created by Ian Andrew and published by Quicksilva in 1983 for the ZX Spectrum. This game featured a character walking through a minefield with numerical clues. Another early version, "Relentless Logic" (or "RLogic"), was created by Conway, Hong, and Smith in 1985 for MS-DOS.

The version that made Minesweeper a household name was written by Robert Donner and Curt Johnson for Microsoft Windows. It was first included with Windows 3.1 in 1992, following Microsoft Entertainment Pack releases. The game was included to help users learn mouse skills — left-clicking, right-clicking, and the (often overlooked) chord-click (clicking both buttons on a numbered cell to reveal safe neighbors). Minesweeper shipped with every version of Windows from 3.1 through Windows 7, making it one of the most-played games in history, with an estimated billion-plus players.

Microsoft removed Minesweeper from Windows 8 in 2012, replacing it with a freemium Xbox version called "Microsoft Minesweeper," which included adventure mode and daily challenges. This decision was controversial among longtime fans.

The competitive Minesweeper community is surprisingly active. The World Record for Expert difficulty (30x16, 99 mines) has been pushed below 30 seconds. The authoritative Minesweeper community website, minesweepergame.com, tracks records and rankings. There is ongoing academic interest in Minesweeper as well — in 2000, Richard Kaye proved that determining whether a Minesweeper position is consistent is NP-complete, connecting the humble game to deep questions in computational complexity theory.

Minesweeper has also influenced puzzle design more broadly. The concept of numbered clues revealing information about hidden elements has been adopted by many subsequent logic puzzles, and "Minesweeper-like" constraints appear in puzzle competitions and hybrid puzzle formats.