Medium minesweeper
A bigger field and the first spots where counting beats clicking on instinct.
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 "medium" means on this level
12×12 with 22 mines — a bigger field than the beginner one and about a fifth denser. That combination changes how the field plays: there are more numbers on screen at once, and more of them touch each other, so the same square is often constrained by two different numbers at the same time.
That is exactly where the subset rule starts to pay off: when the covered neighbours of one number are a subset of another's, the difference between the two tells you something neither number says alone.
How to solve it, step by step
- Open the whole border of the starting area first. Every free number is information, and information is cheaper than a decision.
- Look at pairs of adjacent numbers, not single ones. A 1 next to a 2 that share two covered squares is a solved position, even though neither number alone resolves anything.
- Flag everything you are certain about, then chord. On a 144-square field chording is no longer a trick for speedrunners; it is how you finish in reasonable time.
- Keep the mine counter in view. At this density it closes the last corner of the field surprisingly often.
How long it takes
A first field at this level: three to five minutes. Once the patterns are familiar: 60–120 seconds.
If you find yourself stuck and tempted to click at random — don't. This field is guaranteed solvable by logic alone, so being stuck means the answer is somewhere you have not looked yet, usually two numbers away from where you are staring.
When to move up
Move up when the 1-2 pattern is something you see rather than something you work out. Hard minesweeper is 16×16 with 45 mines — the same rules, but you will need them on almost every part of the field.