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The Minefield
Minesweeper with the coin toss taken out. Every field is dealt over and over until one turns up that can be finished by reasoning alone — so if you lose, you were wrong.

The field

Tap to open, hold to flag — or turn on flag mode and swap the two, which is faster when you have a dozen in a row to mark.

Size & difficulty

Changing either deals a fresh field.

Colours

The numbers keep their classic colours in every scheme — that palette has never been beaten for telling a 2 from a 1 at a glance.

How it works

The rules you know, plus the two things that make it a game rather than a chore.

Never having to guess

Minesweeper's one real flaw is that a perfectly played board can still kill you: you deduce forty squares correctly, arrive at a 50/50 in a corner, and lose ten minutes to a coin. That is not difficulty.

So the field here is not dealt and handed over. It is dealt, then played out by a solver that only makes deductions a person could make — the two obvious counting rules, the subset rule that every 1-2-1 pattern is really made of, and the endgame rule about the mines left over. If the solver gets stuck anywhere, that field is thrown away and another is dealt. What you get is a board that can be finished by reasoning alone.

The solver is deliberately not perfect. A board only solvable by enumerating every possible mine arrangement is not one a person can solve either, so being weaker than perfect is the point.

Chording

Tap a number that already has all its flags placed, and everything else it touches opens at once. This is how the game is played at speed — most of a fast board is chords, not individual taps. Hold your finger on a number and the squares it would open are shown pressed, so you can see what it is about to do.

The first tap is always safe

Not just "not a mine" — the whole field is laid out after your first tap, around it, so the opening is always a clearing rather than a single number. That is also what lets the solver check the board from the exact square you actually started on, which the usual trick of moving one mine out of the way cannot do.

The question mark

Tap a flagged square again and it becomes a ?. It is not decoration: on a big board it is where you park a deduction you haven't finished. A chord will refuse to open a ?, so marking your doubts actually protects you.

Getting around

The big field is 30×16 and your phone is not. Drag to pan, pinch or scroll to zoom. A press that moves is a drag and never opens anything — which is the difference between panning a board and detonating it.