Minesweeper patterns

Updated July 2026

Strong players do not compute every number — they recognise shapes. A handful of arrangements come up on nearly every board, and once you can see them you stop doing arithmetic and start reading. Here are the ones that pay, followed by the single rule that generates all of them.

The two rules everything comes from

Satisfied — a number already touching its full count of mines makes every other neighbour safe.
Exhausted — a number whose covered neighbours exactly equal its remaining mines makes every one of them a mine.

Every pattern below is those two rules in a shape your eye can catch instantly.

The 1-1 wall

Two 1s side by side against a wall of covered tiles, with the run continuing past them. The first 1 already sees a mine among its two covered tiles; the second 1 sees the same pair, so the tile beyond them cannot be a mine.

The 1-2-1

The most useful pattern in the game. Three numbers in a row against covered tiles: the mines sit under the 1s, and the tile under the 2 is safe.

Why: the 2 needs two mines from three tiles. Each 1 needs exactly one from its own pair, and those pairs overlap in the middle. Put a mine in the middle and both 1s are satisfied — leaving the 2 one short with nowhere to put it. So the middle is safe and the ends are mines.

The 1-2-2-1

The 1-2-1's longer cousin, and just as reliable: the mines sit under the two 2s, and the tiles under the 1s are safe. Exactly the reverse of what beginners expect.

Subtraction — the general engine

When no named shape appears, do this instead. Take two numbers whose covered neighbours overlap. If one number's tiles are a subset of the other's, subtract the counts: the difference belongs entirely to the tiles that are not shared.

A 2 and a 1 sharing two tiles: the 2 needs one more mine than the 1 does, and the shared pair can only account for the 1's worth — so the 2's extra tile is a mine. Every pattern with a nickname is a special case of this. Learn subtraction and you never need to memorise another shape.

Corners and edges

Edge tiles touch five neighbours instead of eight; corner tiles touch three. Fewer unknowns means tighter constraints, which means corners resolve first. When a board stalls in the middle, look at its border — the answer is usually there.

The "hacks" that are actually just habits

There is no legitimate cheat for a well-implemented minesweeper — but a few habits look like one from the outside:

Chord everything. Click a satisfied number to open all its neighbours at once. It converts a dozen careful clicks into one.

Stop flagging. Flags cost clicks and the game never checks them. Fast players keep mines in their head and only flag when a chord needs it.

Count the endgame. When the mine counter gets low, total the mines left against the covered tiles left. That global count often resolves positions no local pattern can.

Read the frontier, not the board. Only tiles touching a revealed number carry information. Everything else is noise until the frontier moves.

When the numbers mean something else

These patterns assume a number counts how many mines are adjacent. Change that and every shape changes with it. In Grimlings a number is the summed fangs of adjacent monsters, which come in ranks 1 to 3 — so a "3" is one big monster, or three small ones, or a two and a one. The 1-2-1 still exists, but it has more solutions, and reading it is a richer puzzle. How that works.

Patterns with an extra dimension — free on iPhone and iPad.