Classic Minesweeper online — Beginner (9×9), Intermediate (16×16) and Expert (16×30). First click is always safe. No registration required.

What is Minesweeper?

Minesweeper is a single-player puzzle game where you uncover cells on a grid while avoiding hidden mines. Each revealed cell shows a number indicating how many of its eight neighbours contain mines — and from those numbers alone, you can deduce exactly where every mine is. It is a game of deduction, not luck, and clearing a board without hitting a single mine is deeply satisfying.

How to play

Click any cell to reveal it. Your first click is always safe.
Read the numbers — a "2" means exactly 2 mines are among that cell's neighbours.
Right-click (or long-press) to place a flag on a cell you are sure contains a mine.
Chord-click a numbered cell once all its neighbouring mines are flagged to reveal all remaining safe neighbours at once.
Clear the board by revealing every safe cell without triggering a mine.

Choose Beginner (9×9, 10 mines) to practice, or push yourself with Expert (16×30, 99 mines). Read our Minesweeper strategy guide to learn patterns like 1-2-1 and corner openings.

It looks like luck. It isn't.

The reputation Minesweeper has — "you just guess at the end" — belongs to careless play, not to the game. Strong players solve the vast majority of boards with zero guesses, because every number on the board is a hard constraint, and constraints combine. A lone "1" tells you little; a "1" overlapping a "2" tells you exactly where a mine is. Learning to read two or three numbers together, instead of one at a time, is the whole skill. Our guides break this down with diagrams: the 1-2-1 and 1-2-2-1 patterns you can resolve on sight, counting and subtraction for everything else, and how to pick the least-bad cell on the rare boards where a guess is truly forced.

Choosing a board size

Beginner (9×9, 10 mines) is where you learn to read numbers without pressure — most boards resolve in under a minute. Intermediate (16×16, 40 mines) is the sweet spot for practising patterns: dense enough that 1-2-1s and subtraction situations appear constantly, forgiving enough that one deduction rarely decides the game. Expert (16×30, 99 mines) is the classic benchmark — a fifth of the board is mines, long chains of deductions are mandatory, and finishing it cleanly is a real achievement. If you can clear Expert in under five minutes, you're better than almost everyone you know.

A very short history

Grid-and-mine games date to the 1960s mainframe era, but Minesweeper became universal when Microsoft shipped it with Windows 3.1 in 1992 — officially, legend has it, to teach a generation of office workers precise mouse clicks. It quietly became one of the most played computer games in history. Our version keeps everything that made it great — the numbers, the flags, the chord-click — and removes everything that has since accumulated around free versions of it: no ads over the board, no lives, no login.

Frequently asked questions

Can I lose on the first click?

No. The board is generated after your first click, which is guaranteed to be safe — on most boards it opens a useful area to start deducing from.

Do I have to use flags?

No — flags are for you, not for the game. You win by revealing every safe cell, flagged or not. Many fast players flag only when it enables a chord-click; others flag every mine they find. Both styles work.

What is chord-clicking?

Clicking a revealed number whose mines are all flagged opens every remaining neighbour at once. It's faster than clicking cells one by one — and if your flags are wrong, it's also how you lose spectacularly. Trust it only when your logic does.

Does it work offline?

Yes. Like every game on this site, Minesweeper is cached as a Progressive Web App after your first visit and plays without a connection. Progress and stats stay in your browser; no account exists to sync.