Clear the board without opening a mine. Every number tells you how many mines touch that square, and the whole puzzle unfolds from there.
Beginner, intermediate and expert boards, in the original look, with no timer pressure beyond your own.
Click a square to open it. A number says how many of the eight squares around it hold mines, and an empty square opens its neighbours automatically.
Right click to flag a square you are sure about. Flags are only for you, but they stop you clicking the wrong thing when a board gets busy.
The first click is always safe, so open somewhere in the middle and let a big empty area do the early work for you.
Clear every square that is not a mine and you have won. Open a mine and the board is over, so change the size from the dropdown and go again.
No. The board is arranged after your first click so that it is always safe, which is why opening in the middle gives you more to work with than opening in a corner.
Right click it, or press and hold on a touch screen. Flagging is optional, but it is how most people keep track of what they have already worked out.
All eight neighbouring squares, diagonals included. A 1 touching an unopened corner tells you exactly where that mine is.
Beginner is nine by nine with ten mines, intermediate is sixteen by sixteen with forty, and expert is thirty by sixteen with ninety nine.
Minesweeper came bundled with Windows for years, which is how most people met it, and it has outlived the operating systems it shipped with because the rules are complete in one sentence.
Most of the game is pattern recognition. A 1 and a 2 sitting side by side along a wall, for example, always resolves the same way, and once you know a handful of those shapes the expert board stops being frightening.
The rest is counting. When the numbers run out, the mines you have left over and the squares you have left over are usually enough to finish the job.