How to Play Minesweeper
Minesweeper is a grid of covered cells, and some of them hide mines. Your job is to uncover every cell that is not a mine. You never have to touch the mines themselves: the moment the last safe cell opens, you win. Click a mine and the game is over.
The first click
Your first click in Sapero is always safe. Mines are placed only after it, and never on that cell or its neighbors. That is why the first click nearly always opens a whole area: empty cells keep opening until they run into numbers.
What the numbers mean
A number on an open cell tells you how many mines touch it. Its neighbors are the eight cells around it: above, below, left, right and the four diagonals. A 1 means exactly one of those neighbors is a mine, a 3 means three. An open cell with no number is a zero: no mines around, so the game opens its neighbors for you.
The whole game is reading numbers. Look at the picture above: the 2 in the third row sees four covered cells, while the 1s next to it see only some of them. Comparing neighboring numbers tells you exactly which cells are mines and which are safe. How to compare them is the subject of the patterns chapter.
Flags
When you are sure a cell hides a mine, flag it: right mouse button, a long press on a phone, or the flag button above the board (the F key). A flag protects the cell from a stray click and lowers the mine counter on the left. Flags are optional, though: many strong players skip them entirely because it is faster.
Opening several cells at once
Once a number has as many flags around it as it shows, all its other neighbors are safe. Clicking that number with both mouse buttons (or the middle one) opens them all at once. This is called chording, and the speed chapter covers it in detail.
Board sizes
- Beginner: 9×9, 10 mines. A one-minute game, good for warming up.
- Intermediate: 16×16, 40 mines. Every common pattern shows up here.
- Expert: 30×16, 99 mines. The classic competitive size that records are compared on.
The No-guessing toggle switches to boards that can be solved by logic alone from the first click, and adds the Evil level: 30×20 with 130 mines. Why regular Minesweeper sometimes forces a guess is explained in the 50/50 chapter.
Where to start
Play a few games on Beginner and take your time. Before every click, find a number that proves the cell is empty. If no single number does, look at two neighboring numbers together. Once you can clear boards without hitting mines, move up to Intermediate and then Expert.