Minesweeper Rules and Strategy

Minesweeper is a single-player logic game. The board hides mines, and you must uncover every safe square using the clues the numbers give.

💣 Play it now: open Minesweeper with Easy, Medium and Hard boards.

The rules

• The board is a grid of covered squares. Some hide mines.
• Dig a square to uncover it. If it is a mine, you lose.
• If it is safe, it shows a number from 1 to 8: how many of the eight touching squares (including diagonals) are mines.
• If the square has no mines nearby, it shows blank and all its neighbours open automatically, spreading across the board.
• You can put a flag on squares you think are mines. Flags are only reminders and do not affect the win.
• You win when all non-mine squares are uncovered.

Basic strategy

• A 1 with one covered neighbour: that neighbour is a mine. Flag it.
• A number whose mines are all flagged: every other neighbour is safe. Dig them (tap the number to do this in one go, called chording).
• Corners and edges have fewer neighbours, so they give easier deductions.

Patterns

• 1-2-1 on an edge: with three squares in a row along an open edge showing 1, 2, 1, the mines are under the squares in front of the two 1s and the middle square in front of the 2 is safe.
• 1-1: two neighbouring 1s along an edge, where every covered square next to the first 1 is also next to the second: the mine is among those shared squares, so any covered square touching only the second 1 is safe.
• Counting mines: late in the game, use the mine counter to work out how many mines remain in a small region.

Example: A revealed 2 has exactly two covered neighbours. Both are mines. If another number next to them is a 1 that already touches one of those mines, its other covered neighbours must be safe.

Difficulty on Cheettukali

• Easy: 9×9, 10 mines.
• Medium: 12×14, 28 mines.
• Hard: 12×18, 45 mines.

Tips for avoiding guesses

• Always look for the easy deductions across the whole board before guessing.
• If you must guess, pick the square least likely to be a mine, usually one far from the numbers you are unsure about, rather than next to a 2 or 3.
• Use flags to track what you know so that you do not repeat reasoning.

FAQ