Mizblog

Minesweeper: Advanced Tactics

I like playing Minesweeper. This guy goes into some detailed but not difficult statistics to try to figure out a difficult board position, and the thinking is fascinating, but I would have quickly hit the 50/50 choices (bottom center and top left) and if I survived those, I’d have hit the bottom-right corner square next. It’s got a better than 90% chance to not be a mine, and 60% chance to not be adjacent to a mine (thus opening more free squares and yielding more information about the remaining mine placement).

Of course, if one of those 50/50/90 choices had got me blown up, I’d have just started a new game.

One variant I like to play is where you don’t mark the positions of known mines, leaving them unmarked until the end when you’ve clicked off all the non-mine squares one by one. It’s quite difficult and often slower than the marking method (you can’t use the trick of clicking both buttons to reveal all unmarked adjacent squares) but it sure is a memory challenge. If you like playing minesweeper, you should try it.