How to play Minesweeper
The board hides a set number of mines. Open a cell and you either hit a mine or see a number. That number tells you how many mines touch the cell, diagonals included. A blank cell has no mines around it, so the game opens its neighbors for you.
Read the numbers, flag the cells you know are mines and open everything else. You win when every safe cell is open. Your first click is always safe and always opens a decent patch of the board, at least 15 cells on Easy and 20 on Medium and Hard, so you have numbers to work with right away.
Minesweeper difficulty levels: Easy, Medium and Hard
Easy is a 9 × 9 board with 10 mines, Medium is 16 × 16 with 40 mines and Hard is 16 × 30 with 99 mines, the classic sizes. Pick a level at the top left of the game: a wide screen shows all three as tabs, a narrower one shows a level button that opens the list. Keys 1, 2 and 3 work too.
Each level keeps its own best time on your device, and the game remembers the level you played last.
Minesweeper tips for a faster time
Look at the edges of open areas first. A 1 that touches only one hidden cell means that cell is a mine. A number that already has all its mines flagged means every other cell around it is safe.
Use the quick open: click a number whose flags already match and all its other neighbors open at once. It saves a lot of clicks on Hard. Just make sure your flags are right, because a wrong flag there sets off a mine.
Learn common patterns like 1-2-1 and 1-2-2-1 along a wall. When nothing is certain, guess near the corners or far from the numbers, where the odds are usually better.
How Minesweeper scoring works
Your score is your time in seconds, to one decimal. The timer starts when you open the first cell and stops the moment the last safe cell opens. Lower is better, and only wins count toward your best time.
If you hit a mine, every mine you had not flagged goes off in a chain, wrong flags get marked with an X and the result card shows how much of the board you had cleared.
Can you play Minesweeper on your phone?
Yes. Tap a cell to open it and hold for about a third of a second to place a flag, a small ring fills up while you hold. If you prefer, tap the Dig / Flag button in the top right corner so a tap places flags instead. Tapping a number does the quick open.
When the cells are small, like Medium and Hard on a phone, the board zooms in around your first tap so every cell is big enough for a finger. Drag with one finger to look around, pinch with two fingers to zoom, or tap the magnifier button next to Dig / Flag to see the whole board. When the round ends the board zooms out so you can see every mine.
The full screen button under the game gives you even more room, and on a tall screen the Hard board stands upright, 16 cells wide.