Expert minesweeper
The hardest level here: 320 fields, 66 mines and not one board that requires a guess.
Leaderboard
Keyboard
- Arrows or WASD — move
- Enter or Space — uncover the field
- F — place or remove a flag (right click with a mouse, hold on a touch screen)
- Enter on a number with all its mines flagged uncovers the remaining fields
- One mine ends the game — but no board here ever requires a guess
Latest posts
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The 1-2-1 pattern in minesweeper: read the board instead of guessing
Three adjacent numbers reading 1-2-1 along the edge of the opened area settle the position of two mines with zero risk. Together with 1-2-2 and the mine counter, that is the whole toolkit.
What "expert" means on this level
16×20 with 66 mines — 320 squares at 20.6% mine density, which is exactly the density of the classic 30×16 expert board with 99 mines. The shape is different on purpose: 30 columns means either sideways scrolling or 10-pixel squares on a phone, and most players here are on a phone.
What the density does is remove slack. Nearly every number is constrained by another number, chains of deductions run four or five steps deep, and the mine counter becomes a real tool rather than a formality.
How to solve it, step by step
- Never leave a resolvable position behind you. Coming back to it later means reading the same numbers twice.
- Read triples, not pairs. At this density three consecutive numbers along the frontier often resolve together while no two of them resolve alone.
- Flag with discipline. A single misplaced flag propagates: chording on top of it is how expert fields are actually lost.
- Count what is left. Late in a field, "66 mines minus what I have flagged" frequently settles a whole region that no local rule can touch.
Still no guessing — even here
This is the level where classic minesweeper implementations traditionally hand you a coin flip in the last corner. Here they cannot: the generator runs a solver over every field and discards any field the solver cannot finish with the field rule, the subset rule and the mine counter alone. If you are stuck at expert level, the information you need exists somewhere on the board.
What a good time looks like
A finished expert field is an achievement on its own; the leaderboard shows what the times actually look like. And because the daily challenge is one field for the whole world, an expert day is the one comparison on this site where nothing at all is down to luck.