Minesweeper — Classic Browser Game
Play the classic Minesweeper game in your browser. Three difficulty levels, flag mines, beat your best time.
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Frequently asked questions
How do I control Minesweeper on desktop and mobile?
Is my best time or any progress saved?
What is the best strategy for solving the board quickly?
Who created Minesweeper and when did it first appear?
What are the three difficulty levels?
Can I lose on the very first click?
Is Minesweeper purely logic, or is luck involved?
Is the game accessible for players with disabilities?
What are the world-record times for each difficulty?
What does the smiley face button do?
About Minesweeper — Classic Browser Game
Minesweeper is the iconic single-player logic puzzle that shipped with every version of Microsoft Windows from 3.1 in 1992 until it was removed from the default Windows 8 installation in 2012. During those two decades it became one of the most-played computer games in history, not because players sought it out but because it was simply always there — a gateway to gaming for millions of office workers and home PC users alike. The game was originally designed by Robert Donner and Curt Johnson and included in the Windows Entertainment Pack before being bundled with Windows 3.1. Its purpose, according to Microsoft, was partly to teach users how to use a two-button mouse.
The objective is to reveal every safe cell on the grid without clicking on a hidden mine. Each numbered cell you uncover tells you exactly how many of its eight neighbours contain mines — use that information to deduce, through pure logic, which adjacent cells are safe and which are dangerous. When you are certain a cell contains a mine, right-click it (or long-press on mobile) to place a flag, protecting you from accidentally clicking it. The mine counter in the top-left decreases with each flag placed. Reveal every non-mine cell and you win; click a mine and the game ends. The first click is always safe — mines are placed after your first reveal so you can never lose immediately.
Effective Minesweeper play is less about luck than it appears. Start by clicking somewhere near the centre of the board to open a large safe area, then work systematically from the numbered edges inward. When a numbered cell is surrounded by exactly the right number of flagged mines, its remaining neighbours are all safe — chord-click (both mouse buttons simultaneously) to reveal them all at once. On Expert difficulty, occasional guesses are genuinely unavoidable, but they account for only a small fraction of cells; the vast majority of every grid can be solved with pure deduction.
This browser version is faithful to the classic Windows experience: three preset difficulty levels (Beginner at 9×9 with 10 mines, Intermediate at 16×16 with 40 mines, and Expert at 30×16 with 99 mines), a mine counter, a running timer, and the iconic smiley-face restart button. It runs entirely in your browser with no account, no installation, and no data stored anywhere. Whether you are chasing a personal best time or solving your first-ever board, everything works instantly the moment the page loads.
Minesweeper: The Accidental Global Phenomenon
Minesweeper was not originally conceived as an entertainment product. When Microsoft engineers Robert Donner and Curt Johnson included an early version in the Windows Entertainment Pack in 1990, the game had a practical purpose: to help new PC users practise using a two-button mouse in a low-stakes environment. Left-clicking to reveal and right-clicking to flag was genuinely novel for users who had only ever used single-button mice or no mouse at all. The game was designed to make the mouse feel intuitive before users had to use it for real work.
When Windows 3.1 bundled Minesweeper as a default application in 1992, it reached an enormous audience. Through the 1990s and 2000s, it became the unlikely backdrop of office life worldwide — played quietly during lunch breaks, in the minutes before meetings, and during phone calls. Microsoft estimated at various points that hundreds of millions of people had played it. The game became so associated with office procrastination that several studies cited it as a notable workplace distraction; at least one large corporation famously banned it from company computers.
Minesweeper also spawned a dedicated competitive community that persists today. The international Minesweeper ranking system, maintained at minesweeper.info, tracks thousands of players by their best times across all three standard difficulties. The game has been subjected to rigorous mathematical analysis: researchers have proven that solving an arbitrary Minesweeper configuration is NP-complete, meaning it belongs to the same class of computational hardness as some of the most famous unsolved problems in computer science. That a default Windows accessory encodes such deep mathematical complexity is one of the more surprising footnotes in gaming history.