Hard minesweeper
A large field and the density at which the 1-2-1 pattern stops being optional.
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 "hard" means on this level
16×16 with 45 mines — 256 squares and a mine on nearly every fifth one. At this density the field stops being a series of small local puzzles and becomes one long chain: almost every number shares covered squares with its neighbours, so almost every deduction is a subtraction between two numbers.
The classic patterns stop being optional here. 1-2-1 along a wall puts mines under both ones. 1-2-2 at the edge puts them under the twos. You do not have to know the names, but you do have to spot the shapes, because working each one out from scratch costs the seconds this level is measured in.
How to solve it, step by step
- Work along the frontier, not across the field. Jumping between distant corners wastes more time than any single deduction saves.
- Subtract neighbouring numbers. If two numbers share covered squares, the one with the higher remaining count tells you what is in the difference.
- Chord constantly. With 45 mines to mark, opening squares one by one is what makes a slow time, not the thinking.
- Save the counter for the end. With the last few mines it often resolves an entire corner in one step.
Accuracy over speed
One mine ends the game. That is not harshness — the field is guaranteed solvable without guessing, so a mine means a miscount. On this level the fastest players are not the ones who click fastest; they are the ones who never have to start again.
When to move up
Move up when you finish hard fields more often than you lose them. Expert minesweeper is 16×20 with 66 mines — the density of the classic 30×16 expert board, in a shape that still fits on a phone.