MineSweeper

About the game

MineSweeper is the old logic puzzle of clearing a field without touching a mine. Each revealed tile shows how many of its neighbours hide a mine; from those numbers you work out where the mines are, flag them and open everything else. A timer, a mine counter and a face that reacts to your moves sit at the top of the board.

There are three boards: easy, medium and hard, with growing size and mine count. Your first reveal is guaranteed to be safe, but the game does not promise that a board can be solved without guessing, so sometimes a coin-flip is part of the puzzle. Win and lose each have their own little tune.

Playing it here

Vircon32 is a 32-bit virtual game console designed by Carra: a fantasy machine that never existed as hardware, with a 640x360 screen, 16 sound channels and a simple gamepad, built to be easy to program and to emulate. This game is a native Vircon32 cartridge, so it runs here in the console's official emulator, compiled for the browser; no BIOS or firmware from any company is needed, because the standard open source BIOS of the project is built in.

Click Play, press Enter at the title screen and choose a difficulty. The side panels remind you of the buttons.

Controls

On a phone or tablet the console's buttons appear on screen, under the picture (or on the sides, with the device lying down). A game controller connected to the browser also works. F2 saves the emulator state and F4 loads it. The game's own saves are kept in your browser.

Tips

Start with the corners and the ones. A tile marked 1 next to a single closed neighbour tells you exactly where a mine is.

Flag what you know. Flags help you count the numbers around them, and they protect you from opening a mine by mistake.

Read the pairs. When two neighbouring numbers share most of their closed tiles, comparing them often exposes a safe tile.

Credits and licence

MineSweeper was made by Carra (Copyright 2022) and is free and open source under the 3-Clause BSD licence; by the repository's default the assets are under CC BY 4.0. The menu and gameplay music and the win and lose tunes were composed by Sebastian F. (FraynVGM) for the author and published under CC BY 4.0. We built the cartridge ourselves from the author's source with the official Vircon32 tools; the licence text and the exact source are linked from this page.