Minesweeper Online — No Guessing, No Ads

Classic Minesweeper, free in your browser

This is the Minesweeper you remember: a grid of closed squares, a number of hidden mines, and numbers that tell you how many mines touch each square. Open every square that is not a mine and you win. Open a mine and the game is over. There is nothing to install and no account to create — the board above is ready the moment the page loads.

Three classic sizes are here: Beginner (9×9 with 10 mines), Intermediate (16×16 with 40 mines) and Expert (30×16 with 99 mines). They are the same sizes players have used for decades, so your times mean the same thing as anywhere else. On a phone or a narrow window the Expert board stands upright as 16×30 so that every square stays big enough to tap; on a wide screen it lies flat as 30×16.

Every board can be solved without guessing

The one thing that makes ordinary Minesweeper unfair is the forced guess: two squares, one mine, and no number anywhere that tells them apart. You can play perfectly for ten minutes and still lose on a coin flip. Here that never happens. Every board is checked by a solver before you see it, and the solver only uses what a player can see — the numbers on the board and the number of mines left. If the board would ever need a guess, it is changed and checked again.

That does not make the game easy. Expert boards still need careful reading, pattern recognition and sometimes counting the remaining mines. It only means that when you lose, it was a mistake you could have avoided, and when you win, it was skill. The No guessing page explains how the boards are made and checked.

How to play in thirty seconds

Click any square to start. Your first click is always safe: the square you click and the eight squares around it never hold a mine, so the first click usually opens a whole area. Each number shows how many of its eight neighbours are mines. Use them to work out which closed squares must be mines and which must be safe.

Right-click a square to put a flag on it, or long-press it on a touch screen. There is also a flag mode switch under the board if you prefer tapping. When a number already has the right count of flags around it, click the number to open all its other neighbours at once — this is called chording and it saves a lot of clicks. You never have to flag every mine: opening the last safe square wins the game.

A daily board, and a quiet app on the way

Every day there is one daily board, the same for everyone who plays that day. It starts from a marked square, and its size follows the week: Beginner from Monday to Wednesday, Intermediate from Thursday to Saturday and Expert on Sunday.

The website has no ads, no tracking cookies and no sign-up, and it does not store your games on any server. The Quiet Minesweeper app for iPhone and Android is coming soon. It keeps your best times, your top ten times per level, win streaks and a calendar of daily boards, and it has no ads either.

Questions