How to Play Minesweeper

Minesweeper is a deduction game disguised as a game of luck. Mines are hidden under a grid of tiles. Your job is to open every tile that does not contain a mine, using the numbers that appear as your only clue. Nothing about the board is random once it is generated — the information is always there, you just have to read it.

The goal

You win by opening every safe tile on the board. You lose the moment you open a tile with a mine under it. That is the entire objective, and it never changes no matter which difficulty you pick.

What the numbers mean

When you open a tile, one of two things happens. Either it is empty, which means none of the eight tiles touching it contain a mine, or it shows a number from 1 to 8. That number is the count of mines in the eight tiles that surround it — including diagonals.

Reading the numbers on an opened tile
Number	What it tells you
Empty	All eight neighbours are safe. The game opens them for you automatically, and the chain keeps going until it hits numbers.
1	Exactly one mine is next to this tile.
2	Exactly two mines are next to this tile, and so on up to 8.
8	All eight neighbours are mines. This only happens when a tile is completely surrounded.

Your three moves

You only ever do three things in Minesweeper, and all three are bound to a mouse button or a key.

Open a tile — left click it. If it is safe, it opens. If it is a mine, the game ends.
Flag a tile — right click it. This marks the tile as a known mine so you do not open it by accident. Right click again to remove the flag.
Chord a number — click both mouse buttons at once, or double-click an opened number. If the number of flags around that tile already matches its number, chording opens every remaining neighbour in one move.

Chording is the move that makes good players fast. Instead of opening tiles one at a time, you confirm what you already know and let the game do the clicking for you.

Powered by logic, not luck

Almost every position on a Minesweeper board can be solved by pure deduction. If a tile marked 1 touches only one covered tile, that tile is a mine. If a tile marked 1 already touches a confirmed mine, every other tile around it is safe. Stack those two rules and you can clear most of a board without guessing once.

Only a small number of layouts genuinely require a coin flip. These usually appear at the end of a board, when two tiles are equally likely to hold the last mine and no information is left to separate them. Even the world record holders lose those.

Your first click is always safe

On this site the mines are placed after your first click, and the eight tiles around it are excluded from the mine pool. You cannot lose on the first move, and you cannot lose to a mine that was sitting under your cursor. It also means your opening move always gives you a real amount of information to work from.

The face button

The smiley face in the middle of the toolbar is a reset button. It shows a normal face while you are playing, sunglasses when you win, and a dizzy face when a mine goes off. Click it any time to start the same board size over.

Quick start checklist

Pick a difficulty. Beginner is 9 x 9 with 10 mines and takes most people less than two minutes.
Open a tile near the middle of the board. You get more neighbours there, which means more information.
Read the numbers and flag the mines you can prove. Do not flag anything you are only guessing at.
Chord satisfied numbers to open large areas in one click.
Repeat until every safe tile is open.

That is all there is to it. When you are comfortable with the rules, the strategy guide covers the patterns that speed players use.