Minesweeper

How to Play

1. Open cells with a normal click. Your goal is to reveal every safe cell without opening a mine.
2. A revealed number tells you exactly how many mines exist in the eight neighboring cells.
3. Right-click an unopened cell to place or remove a flag when you believe a mine is there.
4. Opening a zero cell automatically expands the surrounding safe region.
5. You win when every non-mine cell is open. Opening a mine ends the game.

How to Deduce Safe Cells

Treat every revealed number as a local constraint. If a “1” touches exactly one unopened cell, that cell must contain a mine. If a “2” already touches two flagged mines, every other unopened neighbor is safe. Combining several overlapping constraints is the key to solving larger boards without guessing.

Strategy Tips

• Use flags as memory aids, but remember that a flag is only your hypothesis until the surrounding clues confirm it.
• Work from areas with the most information first.
• Compare neighboring numbered cells to infer which unopened cells differ between their constraint sets.
• Use the hint only when you want to focus on learning the deduction process rather than on recovering from an uncertain position.

Reasoning Connection

Minesweeper is primarily a constraint-satisfaction and inference puzzle rather than a strategic game against another player. It is still useful in an algorithms course because it demonstrates local reasoning, information propagation, uncertainty reduction and the difference between logically forced moves and guesses.