Minesweeper

How to play Minesweeper

1. Tap any square to start — the first tap is always safe, and the mines are placed around it.
2. Each number counts the mines touching that square, diagonals included. A blank square means zero, and it opens its whole neighbourhood for free.
3. Sure a square hides a mine? Flag it: right-click on a computer, press-and-hold on a phone. The red counter tracks how many mines are left to find.
4. Speed move — chording: when a number already has exactly that many flags beside it, tap the number and everything else around it opens at once. Wrong flag? Boom.
5. Open every safe square to win. The clock is the score; your best time per difficulty stays on your device. The smiley starts a new game — it always has.

A little background

Minesweeper's logic dates back to mainframe games of the 1960s, but the version everyone remembers arrived in 1990 and rode along with Windows for two decades — famously included, the story goes, to teach a generation precision mouse skills and the very idea of the right-click. It worked: the gray bevels, the red LED counters, and the little smiley became one of the most-played games in history, mostly during phone calls and dial-up waits.

This version keeps that object intact — the bevelled tiles, the exact number colours, the smiley that panics when you press and puts on sunglasses when you win — and adds the two things the old one never had: a first click that's guaranteed safe, and touch controls done properly (hold to flag, tap a satisfied number to chord). Free, no ads, works offline once loaded.