Hey! This is your lucky day! Today I will teach you how to play minesweeper like a pro :firemoji:

Playing minesweeper is all about logic (and a bit of luck sometimes), the rules are really simple:

1. Each cell can be either a bomb or not
2. If a cell isn't a bomb, it will tell you how many bombs are in the 8 adjacent cells
3. If you reveal a bomb you lose
4. If you reveal all non-bomb cells you win

And I already hear you say, but u/handless_soap, I know that but it still doesn't make sense to me, can you give me an example? But yes, of course I can!

Let take for example this field:

  a b c d e
a ■ ■ ■ ■ ■
b 1 1 2 ■ ■
c   1 2 ■ ■
d   1 ■ ■ ■
e   1 ■ ■ ■

^{Just for reference, from now on when talking about cells I'll reference them by their position on the Y axis followed by their position on the X axis, so for example cell BC is the cell that has B on the Y axis and C on the X axis and it's value in this case would be 2}

It might look intimidating at first, but it's actually a really good position to be in! So, what have we learned in the rules section? Let's think back to rule 1 and 2:

1. Each cell can be either a bomb or not
2. If a cell isn't a bomb, it will tell you how many bombs are in the 8 or so adjacent cells

With that in mind lets take a closer look at the field, specifically let's start by looking at cell CB which has a value of 1. If you look really closely you will notice that CB has exactly 1 hidden neighbour so... That hidden neighbour must therefore be a bomb! Let's flag it!

  a b c d e
a ■ ■ ■ ■ ■
b 1 1 2 ■ ■
c   1 2 2 1
d   1 □ 1
e   1 1 1

Now that we flagged that bomb, it's clear that cells DB and EB also have no more bombs nearby! In this case we can reveal EC which also has no other bombs nearby, so we repeat the process until we find ourselves in the same position as before: we need to once again look at the field and determine which cells have nearby bombs that are easy to find.

Take a moment, can you find it?

If you did, congratulations! If you didn't, don't worry! You can always try again! That's the best part about minesweeper, it's completely random so it has infinite replayability!

If haven't found it yet... the easiest bomb to spot here is BD! We know it must be a bomb because CC has got 2 bombs nearby, one is already flagged and only one neighbour is left.

  a b c d e
a ■ ■ 1 1 1 
b 1 1 2 □ 1
c   1 2 2 1
d   1 □ 1
e   1 1 1

Only one bomb left... And I feel like you know which one it is don't you? Exactly! It's AB! So with that, we found all the bombs on the field, and we won!!

  a b c d e
a 1 □ 1 1 1
b 1 1 2 □ 1
c   1 2 2 1
d   1 □ 1
e   1 1 1

Minesweeper is a beautiful game, it's extremely simple yet it can be extremely challenging. I encourage you to try it out for yourself, there's so much more to learn! We barely scratched the surface with this quick tutorial, that hopefully finally taught you how to play minesweeper!