Beginner Minesweeper (9×9 · 10 mines)

The Beginner board: 9×9 with 10 mines

Beginner is the smallest classic board: 81 squares and 10 mines, so a little over one square in eight is a mine. Because mines are sparse, your first click usually opens a large empty area with numbers all around its edge, and most of the board can be read with the simplest rules. A game often takes less than a minute once you know what you are doing.

That makes Beginner the right place to learn, and also a good warm-up for experienced players who want to practise speed. Like every board on this site, each Beginner board is checked by a solver before you see it, so it can always be finished without guessing.

How to solve a Beginner board

Start by looking for 1s that touch only one closed square. That square must be the mine — flag it. Then look at the numbers around that flag. Any number that already has as many flags as its value is finished, and every other closed square next to it is safe. Open those squares, read the new numbers, and repeat.

On Beginner, those two rules carry you through most of the board. When they stop working, look along the edges of the open area for a row of numbers such as 1-1 or 1-2-1 next to a straight line of closed squares. The How to play page shows each of these patterns on a real board with the safe squares and mines marked.

Why Beginner boards rarely end in a guess anyway — and why we check them all

With so few mines, most random Beginner boards are already solvable without guessing: in our tests about 91% of plain random Beginner boards happened to be guess-free. The other 9% still contain a spot where two squares cannot be told apart. On a small board that is easy to dismiss, but losing a clean run to a coin flip is just as annoying at 9×9 as at 30×16.

So the same generator is used for every level. The board is created after your first click, the solver plays it from that square using only what a player could see, and only a board it can finish is shown to you.

Getting faster

Once Beginner feels easy, the next step is efficiency rather than difficulty. Use chording — clicking a satisfied number to open its neighbours — instead of opening squares one by one, and only flag mines you need for a chord. Fewer clicks means faster times. The app will show 3BV per second, a common measure of how efficiently you clear a board, along with your best times.

When a Beginner board takes you only a few seconds of thinking from start to finish, move up to Intermediate. The rules are identical, but the board is four times larger and the mines are denser, so the patterns described on the How to play page start to appear on almost every game.

Questions