Tag: I grew up with no internet starter pack

aziminil:

myunrealisticfiction:

goldensweetcheeks:

Does anybody know how to play bottom right? Like did anybody figure it out yet?

You just tap it and hope for the best

Minesweeper is ridiculously simple, and actually pretty easy as well once you learn the patterns. You won’t ever win every single game, because there is an element of chance that can crop up, but for the most part it is a very, very simple logic game.

There are two rules:

  1. A number represents how many mines there are in the 8 tiles surrounding the number
  2. Don’t click mines

That’s it. That’s the whole game. The rest is figuring out the patterns to determine which tiles have mines. For example, let’s use a piece of the game above. Look at the tile I’ve drawn a red border around.

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There is one mine surrounding this tile, and all but one surrounding tile is already revealed. Therefore, this square must be a mine (you can right click to add a flag):

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Moving on from there, look at this tile:

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There are two mines surrounding it. Only two surrounding tiles are unrevealed, and we already know the one on top is a mine. So this one is also a mine:

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Now we have this tile:

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There are two mines surrounding it, but there are three unrevealed tiles next to it. However, we already determined that two out of the three are mines, so that third one is safe to click! This will reveal another number. Since I’m not actually playing a real game and am just going off a picture, I don’t know what that number would be. But you can continue the logic from there.

There are some tougher scenarios, though. For example, again from the picture above:

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Where do we go from here? There are no immediately obvious moves like before, but you can still figure out what goes where. Look at this part:

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There are three mines bordering the 3. One is already marked, but where do the other two go? Well, because of the 1 at the top, we know that only one of those two mines can be in this section:

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Leaving this one as definitely a mine:

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We also know that since the third mine in this section must be in one of the two remaining squares, and there is only one mine bordering the 1, this square is safe to click!

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And so are these two at the bottom, since there are now two known mines bordering that 2:

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I could go on, there are a lot of patterns of shapes and numbers that you begin to recognize quite easily the more you play. All it comes down to is using the numbers in combination with each other to figure everything out. You will definitely run into a lot of games where you hit a roadblock and can’t progress using logic alone. You’ll run into games where you lose on the second click while trying to open up a space big enough determine anything at all. You’ll misclick during a really good streak and want to throw your laptop across the room. But that’s just the nature of the game sometimes.

Anyway this has gone on long enough so here are my stats from my last computer, before I bought the new one, and my current set,all on the Advanced difficulty level.

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TL;DR I fucking love Minesweeper thank you for coming to my TED Talk