Minesweeper

Opening a cell reveals a number showing how many of its eight neighbors are mines. Clear every cell that isn't a mine to win, and opening a mine ends the game instantly.

Your very first click is always guaranteed safe, along with the cells around it — there's no way to lose on move one just from bad luck.

On desktop, left-click to open and right-click to flag. On touch screens, tapping a safe cell opens it instantly, while tapping a cell that looks risky brings up separate open/flag buttons so you don't accidentally trigger a mine.

Once you've flagged as many mines around a numbered cell as that number says, clicking the number again (both mouse buttons at once) opens all of its remaining neighbors at once.

On touch screens, swiping left on a numbered cell triggers the same shortcut. If a flag is placed wrong, chording can open a mine — skip it unless you're confident in every flag around that cell.

There are three difficulties — Easy (9×9, 10 mines), Medium (16×16, 40 mines), and Hard (16×30, 99 mines) — and Medium and Hard are unavailable on narrow screens.

Score is calculated as a base score minus your clear time in seconds. The base is 1,000 for Easy, 5,000 for Medium, and 10,000 for Hard — a much higher ceiling on harder difficulties, but with far more cells and mines to work through.

The chord-opening shortcut is a fast way to clear out a section you've already worked out is safe.

Rather than guessing on an uncertain cell, cross-referencing the numbers you've already revealed to logically rule mines in or out becomes especially important on the harder difficulties.

For example, if a cell marked 1 has exactly one unopened neighbor, that neighbor is guaranteed to be a mine — hunting for these certain patterns beats guessing every time.

When you truly have to rely on probability, compare the number of remaining mines to the number of unopened cells and pick the one that looks statistically safest.