How to play minesweeper
Updated July 2026
If you have never finished a board, the problem is almost never intelligence — it is that nobody showed you the first three deductions. Here they are, in the order you meet them. (For the formal version, see the rules.)
1. Open anywhere, then look for blanks
Your first click is safe in every modern version, so just click. What you want is a cascade — a blank tile whose neighbours open automatically, giving you a wall of numbers to work from. A corner or an edge is a slightly better opening than the middle, because edge tiles touch fewer tiles and produce tighter constraints.
2. Find a number whose mines are all accounted for
The first real deduction: a "1" touching exactly one covered tile. That tile is the mine — there is nowhere else for it to be.
3. Use that mine to free everything else
Once a mine is known, every number touching it has one fewer mine to place. A "1" that already touches a known mine is satisfied: all its other neighbours are safe, and you can open them without thinking.
That loop — find a forced mine, use it to satisfy a number, open what that frees — solves most of a beginner board on its own.
4. When the loop stalls, subtract
Sooner or later no single number decides anything. Then you compare two of them. If one number's covered neighbours are entirely contained inside another's, subtract: the difference tells you about the tiles that are not shared. That is the engine behind every named pattern, including the famous 1-2-1. Those are worth learning properly — it is the biggest single jump in ability.
5. Do not guess early
Early guesses feel cheap because they are: the board usually has a provable move somewhere else. Scan the whole frontier before you gamble. Late in a classic board, though, a genuine 50/50 can exist and no amount of scanning will help — that is a flaw in the board, not in you, and it is exactly what no-guess generation fixes.
Playing on Google's version
Search "minesweeper" on Google and you get a playable board. Same rules; flags are placed with right-click on desktop, or by switching to flag mode on mobile. Everything on this page applies unchanged.
Frequently asked
How do you play minesweeper for the first time?
Click anywhere, look for a number touching exactly as many covered tiles as it needs mines, flag those, then open everything around numbers that are already satisfied.
What do the numbers mean?
How many of the eight neighbouring tiles are mines.
Why did I lose on my first click?
You shouldn't have — modern versions place mines after your first click.
Learn it once, then play a version that never cheats you.
