How to play Minesweeper

A Minesweeper board begins with covered squares. Some hide mines; the rest are safe. Reveal all safe squares to finish the puzzle. A blank revealed square has no adjacent mines and usually opens a larger clear area. A revealed number from 1 to 8 tells you exactly how many mines touch that square horizontally, vertically, or diagonally.

Flags are notes for squares you have proved contain mines. They help you count, but placing every flag is not the goal: the board is complete when every safe square is open. Clever Pause keeps an incorrect reveal covered instead of destroying the board, so you can return to the clues and find the unsupported assumption.

The first deduction proves a mine. If a revealed 1 touches exactly one covered square and no flagged mine, that covered square must be the mine. More generally, subtract the number of adjacent flags from the clue. When the result equals the number of unflagged covered neighbors, all of those neighbors are mines.

The second deduction proves safety. If a clue already touches the number of flags it requires, every other covered neighbor is safe. For example, once a 2 touches two proven flags, any additional covered squares around that 2 can be revealed. These two counts solve many easy boards by themselves.

Harder positions appear when one clue cannot settle its neighbors alone. Compare two nearby clues whose covered neighborhoods overlap. If a 1 says one mine lies somewhere in squares A and B, while an adjacent 2 says two mines lie in A, B, and C, square C must be the second mine. The shared A and B account for the difference between the clues.

The same comparison can prove safe squares. If two clues need the same remaining number of mines, but one clue sees every square seen by the other plus an extra square, that extra square is safe. This is subset logic: one covered group is contained inside another, so subtracting the smaller requirement isolates what the added squares can contain.

Flag only a square supported by a clue count. Too many speculative flags can make a false deduction look valid because later counts treat those flags as facts. If you are unsure, leave the square covered and inspect another clue. The reveal and flag modes on touch screens make the current action explicit; keyboard and pointer controls keep the same board state.

After each reveal, scan the new boundary between open and covered squares. Fresh numbers may complete an earlier clue or create an overlapping group. After each flag, revisit every number that touches it. A short, local rescan is more reliable than sweeping the whole board without a specific count in mind.

When no single clue appears decisive, do not choose the square that merely looks safest. First verify every flag, then compare neighboring clue groups and search a different edge of the open area. A deduction elsewhere often opens information that resolves the original position. The expected mine density or shape of the field is never proof for one square.

Clever Pause starts each board from a fixed safe opening and validates the published position with single-clue and subset deductions. That means a logical continuation exists. Use Hint to identify the next supported idea, then count the highlighted neighbors yourself before applying it. This keeps the hint part of the solve rather than an unexplained answer.