Play free Minesweeper online — reveal every safe cell and flag the mines without setting one off. Three difficulty levels, playable on any device.
💣 Minesweeper
Reveal every safe cell without hitting a mine.
🚩 10
⏱ 0:00
Press and hold to preview a cell — slide to the right one before letting go, or slide off the grid to cancel. Long-press (or right-click) to flag. Once a number's flagged mines match its count, tap it again to auto-clear its other neighbours.
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Register Free 🚀About Minesweeper
Minesweeper has been sitting on office computers since 1990 and remains one of the purest deduction games ever written. Behind the grid is a single question, asked a few hundred times: given the numbers I can see, which of these cells cannot possibly hide a mine?
The first tap is always safe
Mines are placed after your first tap, never before, and never in the eight cells touching it. Losing on move one is therefore impossible, and your opening always clears a patch of board to reason from. It also means no opening square is luckier than another — the middle simply opens more space than a corner does.
From there the board is information, not chance. Every number you uncover constrains its neighbours, and most positions can be settled without a guess.
Two rules solve most boards
A number tells you how many mines sit among the eight cells around it. Two consequences follow immediately. If a number already has that many flagged neighbours, every remaining neighbour is safe. If a number has exactly as many unrevealed neighbours as its value, every one of those neighbours is a mine.
Almost all of Minesweeper is those two rules applied over and over. Where they stall, stop looking at one number alone and look at pairs of adjacent numbers: a 1 and a 2 sharing cells often resolves what neither settles by itself. That reasoning is worked through step by step at cerdikcerdik.com/blog/minesweeper-logic-not-luck.
Chording, the trick most players miss
Once the right number of mines around a revealed number is flagged, tap that number again — or right-click it — and every remaining neighbour clears at once. Strong players spend most of their game chording rather than opening single cells; it is the difference between a three-minute board and a one-minute one.
The catch is that it trusts your flags completely. Chord on a number whose flags are wrong and it will happily clear a mine, so place flags because you deduced them, not because a cell felt suspicious.
Difficulty and playing on touch
Easy is an 8×8 grid with 10 mines, Medium 10×10 with 18, and Hard 12×12 with 30. Mine density climbs from roughly one cell in six to one in five. That sounds minor, but it sharply raises how often a board ends in a genuine coin flip between two cells.
Touch is handled properly: hold your finger down to see which cell is selected, slide to correct your aim, then let go to reveal it. Long-press flags a cell, or switch to Flag mode if you prefer. Losing a good board to a fat-fingered tap is the most annoying way to go, and it should not happen here.
Frequently asked questions
Is Minesweeper luck or skill?
Mostly skill. The first tap is free, and from there the great majority of boards can be cleared by deduction alone. A small number do end in a genuine coin flip between two cells — but if you are guessing often, it usually means a deduction was available and got missed.
What do the numbers mean?
A number counts the mines hidden in the eight cells surrounding it. A cell that opens blank has zero mines around it, which is why its neighbours open automatically in a cascade.
How do I flag a mine on a phone?
Long-press the cell, or switch on Flag mode and tap normally. Flags mark cells you have deduced are mines and are what makes chording safe.
Do I have to flag every mine to win?
No. You win by revealing every cell that is not a mine. Flags are bookkeeping for your benefit — the game never requires them.