board,first click, second click

The board

Minesweeper has three standard boards to choose from, each progressively more difficult.

·         Beginner: 9 x 9 grid, 81 tiles, 10 mines

·         Intermediate:  16 x 16 grid, 256 tiles, 40 mines

·         Expert:  16 x 30, 480 tiles, 99 mines

·         Custom: up to 24 x 30, 720 tiles, 667 mines

First click

                                                                          

Tim Kostka used his knowledge of Board Cycles to find the actual chance of finding openings on Windows Minesweeper. The first click is always safe because any mine is moved to the top left corner or nearest empty squares to its right. This means the top left corner gives fewer openings than the other corners. It also means fewer openings result from the edge and middle squares touching the top left corner.

	Beginner	Intermediate	Expert
Corner	50 - 60 %	50 - 60 %	40 - 50 %
Edge	34 - 42 %	36 - 43 %	25 - 32 %
Middle	19 - 24 %	21 - 26 %	12 - 16 %

Your best chance of getting a large opening is in the middle, then on an edge, then in a corner. So far no one has calculated the theoretical advantage, but Tim collected actual results from Windows Minesweeper. The biggest openings occur in the very center of the board and decrease as you approach edges. The biggest openings from clicking on an edge are in the middle and decrease as you approach corners. This chart shows the variations in the average number of squares for each opening:

	Beginner	Intermediate	Expert
Corner	18%	27%	16%
Edge	20 – 24%	31 – 42%	19 – 26%
Middle	23 – 32%	35 – 66%	23 – 41%

Second click

With Minesweeper, no matter where you click first, it won't be a mine. The second click, though, could be a safe square or a mine. To figure out what the chance of clicking on a mine with the second click, I just divided the number of remaining safe squares by the total number of squares

	Beg.	Int.	Exp.	Custom (Max.)
Total (HxW)	81	256	480	720
#/Mines	10	40	99	667
#/Safe Squares	70	215	380	52
Chance of clicking a safe square	88%	84%	79%	7%
Chance of clicking a mine	12%	16%	21%	93%

Features, question marking, flagging

Game Features

Ø  At the upper left (lower right in new versions) of the game board is a backwards counter. This counter starts at the total number of mines for the level (40 in the case of Intermediate), and then subtracts one for every mine flagged during play.

Ø  At the upper right hand corner (lower left in new versions) of the game board is the time counter, which counts the number of seconds elapsed since the first cell was cleared. The counter can only go to 999 seconds.

Ø  In the windows vista and previous versions, there is a smiley face which is used to start a new game.

Ø  On the tiles, some numbers appear to show how many mines surround the number.

Question Marking

This is done by right clicking twice. It is used when uncertain of what is behind a square. This feature can be turned off under the Game menu.

Flagging

This is done by double clicking. Flagging is relied upon when the player is sure of a mine being in a square.

Aim, background and instruction

Aim

The goal of the game is to uncover all the squares that do not contain mines (with the left mouse button) without being "blown up" by clicking on a square with a mine underneath. 

Background

This is a single-player puzzle computer game written by Robert Donner and Curt Johnson. It is a deceptively simple test of memory and reasoning.

Instructions 

•       Open Minesweeper and pick your difficulty. When you open the game, click on the "Game" menu and choose beginner, intermediate, expert or custom.

•       Start the game by clicking on one of the squares in the grid. The first space you click will never contain a mine.

•       Make your second move. Your second move can be the beginning of locating mines or a complete guess depending on the success of your first move.

•       Begin isolating mines as soon as you have an open area. The numbers will tell you how many mines are touching that space so you need to use these to find the mines.

•       Continue with the game until you uncover all the spaces that are not mines or until you click on a mine and lose. Sometimes you will be faced with a situation where you will have to guess at where a mine is. This is particularly common on expert mode, so there is still an aspect of luck as well as skill.

Origin

ORIGIN

The Minesweeper Wiki credits a game called RLogic (Relentless Logic) in 1985 by Conway, Hong and Smith as the first game to introduce the concept of today’s popular Minesweeper

RLogic (The father of Minesweeper)

       

The game RLogic takes place on a grid of 9 by 15 squares over which 10-40 mines are randomly spread (at the beginning of the game the player may choose the number of mines – the more mines, the harder the game will be). The object of the game is to navigate a Marine safely from the top-left to the bottom right-corner of the grid using the arrow keys without stepping on a mine. If you step on a mine you lose.

Unlike Minesweeper, RLogic did not save high scores.