Minesweeper

Minesweeper shipped with Windows 3.1 in 1992 and quietly became one of the most-played computer games in history. The mechanic is unchanged thirty-three years later because it didn't need changing — it's the cleanest expression of deductive logic in any video game. You see a grid. You click. A number appears. The number tells you how many of the adjacent eight cells hide a mine. From that fact, repeatedly, you reason your way across the entire board.

Our version is the original Microsoft Minesweeper with a slightly modern paint job. Easy gives you 9 by 9 with 10 mines — a two-minute game once you know what you're doing. Medium is 16 by 16 with 40 mines, the standard intermediate board, where most players sit. Hard is 30 by 16 with 99 mines, which the original Microsoft version called Expert and which still takes 200-400 seconds for an experienced player.

The first click is always safe. This is a quality-of-life feature that was added to most Minesweeper clones in the 2000s. The original Windows version would happily kill you on click one, and after a few decades of complaints, every modern variant guarantees a safe first click. We do too — and we go further and make sure your first click opens up at least a small empty region, so you have something to start reasoning from instead of a single revealed number.

How to actually be good at it. Beginners think Minesweeper is about luck. It mostly isn't. After the first click, almost every move is deducible from the numbers. The skill is learning the standard patterns — a 1 next to a single unrevealed cell means that cell is the mine; a 2 next to two adjacent unrevealed cells means both are mines; the 1-2-1 pattern along an edge means the outer cells are mines and the middle is safe. Recognising these patterns instantly is what separates fast players from slow ones.

Flags are your scratchpad. Even when you've deduced a mine, flag it so you don't accidentally click it later when your eye drifts. Right-click (or long-press on a touchscreen) to flag.

Build notes. The flood-fill that reveals connected empty cells is a simple recursive function — when you click a zero, the algorithm cascades outward through all neighbouring zeros and stops at any cell with a number. This is what makes a single click sometimes open up half the board, and it's the satisfying-sounding part of the game.