Rambling About Minesweeper

rambling about minesweeper

My favorite thing is when you’re near the end of the game, and there’s an area left, but no way to advance from the edge without guessing – then you figure out the minimum number that must be along the edge and look at the number of unflagged mines left: how many mines does that leave unaccounted for? Could be few enough that it’s safer to click in the depths of the uncovered area than along the edge. Maybe you’ll click right in a big empty space, and the edge will practically be all that’s left. Maybe you’ll uncover a smaller pocket, and work your way outward from there. Maybe you only uncover a few tiles, but those tiles give you the information you need to make a breakthrough nearby. Or maybe! some more complex deduction is called for, with overlapping areas of “there’s gotta be [X] many mines here”. I love it!!!

But as much as I love working with those scenarios, I hardly ever run into them, because 1) getting that far on expert level in the first place requires quite a bit of time, and persisting through some inevitable failed games, 2) it could easily turn out that you progress through the rest of the board smoothly and without any hiccups. Which, I mean, is fine if your goal is just to finish the game, but I’ve finished the game tons of times by now. I don’t get any sense of accomplishment from that anymore. It’s the journey that I enjoy, hence *gestures to first paragraph* all that.

“But wait, if these scenarios are in the endgame, why not play on the levels with smaller boards? Then you’d get to the end faster.” Well, expert level doesn’t just have a bigger board. It also has a higher mine density. And that higher density is critical for these scenarios forming in the first place. If the density is too low, then you’ll just sail smoothly to the end. Now, some Minesweeper games allow you to make custom boards, where you specify the size and the number of mines. But I haven’t found one of those that I really liked. Largely because I’ve gotten used to cardgames.io’s interface, though there was one with controls that just flat out sucked. No chording/expansion clicks??? What is this, the stone age??? But yeah, other boards just seem uncomfortably small now.