Minesweeper(video game)

This article is about the Minesweeper game as a whole. For the Microsoft version, seeMicrosoft Minesweeper.

Minesweeperis a logicpuzzle video gamegenre generally played onpersonal computers.The game features a grid of clickable tiles, with hidden "mines" (depicted asnaval minesin the original game) scattered throughout the board. The objective is to clear the board without detonating any mines, with help from clues about the number of neighboring mines in each field. Variants ofMinesweeperhave been made that expand on the basic concepts, such asMinesweeper X,Crossmines,andMinehunt.Minesweeperhas been incorporated as a minigame in other games, such asRuneScapeandMinecraft's2015April Foolsupdate.

A completed expert game ofKMines,afree and open-sourcevariant ofMinesweeper

The origin ofMinesweeperis unclear. According toTechRadar,the first version of the game was 1990'sMicrosoft Minesweeper,butEurogamersaysMined-OutbyIan Andrew(1983) was the first Minesweeper game. Curt Johnson, the creator ofMicrosoft Minesweeper,acknowledges that his game's design was borrowed from another game, but denies that it wasMined-Out.

Gameplay

Minesweeperis apuzzle video game.In the game, mines (that resemblenaval minesin the classic theme) are scattered throughout a board, which is divided into cells. Cells have three states: unopened, opened and flagged. An unopened cell is blank and clickable, while an opened cell is exposed. Flagged cells are those marked by the player to indicate a potential mine location.

A player selects a cell to open it. If a player opens a mined cell, the game ends. Otherwise, the opened cell displays either a number, indicating the number of mines diagonally and/or adjacent to it, or a blank tile (or "0" ), and all adjacent non-mined cells will automatically be opened. Players can also flag a cell, visualised by a flag being put on the location, to denote that they believe a mine to be in that place.Flagged cells are still considered unopened, and a player can click on them to open them.In some versions of the game when the number of adjacent mines is equal to the number of adjacent flagged cells, all adjacent non-flagged unopened cells will be opened, a process known aschording.

Objective and strategy

A game ofMinesweeperbegins when the player first selects a cell on a board. In some variants the first click is guaranteed to be safe, and some further guarantee that all adjacent cells are safe as well.During the game, the player uses information given from the opened cells to deduce further cells that are safe to open, iteratively gaining more information to solve the board. The player is also given the number of remaining mines in the board, known as theminecount,which is calculated as the total number of mines subtracted by the number of flagged cells (thus the minecount can be negative if too many flags have been placed).

To win a game ofMinesweeper,all non-mine cells must be opened without opening a mine. There is no score, but there is a timer recording the time taken to finish the game. Difficulty can be increased by adding mines or starting with a larger grid. Most variants of Minesweeper that are not played on a fixed board offer three default board configurations, usually known as Beginner, Intermediate, and Expert, in order of increasing difficulty. Beginner is usually on an 8x8 or 9x9 board containing 10 mines, Intermediate is usually on a 16x16 board with 40 mines and expert is usually on a 30x16 board with 99 mines; however, there is usually an option to customise board size and mine count.

• An example beginner (9x9) difficulty Minesweeper game from start to solved state
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History

According toTechRadar,Minesweeperwas created by Microsoft in the 1990s,butEurogamercommented thatMinesweepergained a lot of inspiration from a "lesser known, tightly designed game",Mined-OutbyIan Andrewfor theZX Spectrumin 1983.According to4 Andrew, Microsoft copiedMined-OutforMicrosoft Minesweeper.The Microsoft version made its first appearance in 1990, inWindows Entertainment Pack,which was given as part ofWindows 3.11.The game was written by Robert Donner and Curt Johnson.Johnson stated thatMicrosoft Minesweeper's design was borrowed from another game, but denies it wasMined-Out.In 2001, a group called the International Campaign to Ban Winmine campaigned for the game's topic to be changed from landmines.The group commented that the game "is an offence against the victims of the mines".A later version, found present inWindows Vista'sMinesweeper,offered a tileset with flowers replacing mines as a response.

Another early version (predating evenWindows 1.0) is theSunOS(Unix) video gameMines,released in 1987 and written by Tom Anderson. According to minesweeper.com, it was ported toXWindowsin 1990.

The game is frequently bundled withoperating systemsanddesktop environments,including Minesweeper forIBM'sOS/2,Microsoft Windows,KDE,GNOMEandPalm OS.Microsoft Minesweeperwas included by default in Windows untilWindows 8(2012).Microsoft replaced this with a free-to-play version of the game, downloadable from theMicrosoft Store.

Variants

Variants of Minesweeper have been made that expand on the basic concepts and add new game design elements.Minesweeper Xis acloneof the Microsoft version with improved randomization and more statistics,and is popular with players of the game intending to reach a fast time.ArbiterandViennasweeperare also clones, and are used similarly toMinesweeper X.Crossminesis a more complex version of the game's base idea, adding linked mines and irregular blocks.BeTrappedtransposes the game into a mystery game setting.There are several direct clones ofMicrosoft Minesweeperavailable online.

Minesweeper Q was released in 2011 by the independent developer Spicaand is another clone of the Microsoft version available as a mobile and tablet app for iOS users. It includes quick flagging and quick open mode. Users also have the option to change their board appearance from the classic gray/mines to flowers or clouds. Because this version is limited to use on mobile and iPad it is not ideal for players aiming to reach a fast time.

Minesweeper was made part ofRuneScapethrough a minigame calledVinesweeper.The non-Japanese releases ofPokémon HeartGold and SoulSilvercontained a variation of both Minesweeper andPicross.The video gameMinecraftreleased a version of Minesweeper in its 2015 April Fool's update.TheHP-48Ggraphing calculatorincludes a variant called "Minehunt", where the player has to move safely from one corner of the playfield to the other. The only clues given are how many mines are in the squares surrounding the player's current position.Google search includes a version of Minesweeper as aneaster egg,available by searching the game's name.

Alogic puzzlevariant of minesweeper, suitable for playing on paper, starts with some squares already revealed. The player cannot reveal any more squares, but must instead mark the remaining mines correctly. Unlike the usual form of minesweeper, these puzzles usually have a unique solution. These puzzles appeared under the name "tentaizu" ( thiên thể đồ ), Japanese for astar map,in Southwest Airlines' magazineSpiritin 2008–2009.

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  A tentaizu puzzle
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  Online, non-rectangular
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  Hexagonal
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  Triangular
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  Multiple mines in cells
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  Emoji minesweeper

Competitive play

Competitive Minesweeper players aim to complete the game as fast as possible. The players memorize patterns to reduce times.Some players use a technique called the "1.5 click", which aids in revealing mines, while other players do not flag mines at all.The game is played competitively in tournaments.A community of dedicated players has emerged; this community was centralized on websites such asMinesweeper.info.As of 2015, according to theGuinness Book of World Records,the fastest time to complete all three difficulties of Minesweeper is 38.65 seconds by Kamil Murański in 2014.

Computational complexity

In 2000, Sadie Kayepublished a proof that it isNP-completeto determine whether a given grid of uncovered, correctly flagged, and unknown squares, the labels of the foremost also given, has an arrangement of mines for which it is possible within the rules of the game. The argument is constructive, a method to quickly convert anyBoolean circuitinto such a grid that is possibleif and only ifthe circuit issatisfiable;membership in NP is established by using the arrangement of mines as a certificate.If, however, a minesweeper board is already guaranteed to be consistent, solving it is not known to be NP-complete, but it has been proven to beco-NP-complete.In the latter case, however, minesweeper exhibits aphase transitionanalogous tok-SAT: when more than 25% squares are mined, solving a board requires guessing an exponentially-unlikely set of mines.Kaye also proved that infinite Minesweeper isTuring-complete.

See also

• Board puzzles with algebra of binary variables

References

General references

• Adamatzky, Andrew(1997). "How cellular automaton plays Minesweeper".Applied Mathematics and Computation.85(2–3):127–137.doi:10.1016/S0096-3003(96)00117-8.
• Lakshtanov, Evgeny; Oleg German (2010). "'Minesweeper' and spectrum of discrete Laplacians ".Applicable Analysis.89(12):1907–1916.arXiv:0806.3480.doi:10.1080/00036811.2010.505189.S2CID17474183.
• Mordechai Ben-Ari (2018).Minesweeper is NP-Complete(PDF)(Report). Weizmann Institute of Science, Department of Science Teaching. Archived fromthe original(PDF)on 9 June 2019.— An open-access paper explaining Kaye's NP-completeness result.

External links

• Richard Kaye's Minesweeper pages
• Microsoft Minesweeperplayable in the browser on theInternet Archive