Minesweeper has been around since the late 1980s and it still trips up new players because nobody really explains it. You get a grid of grey squares, a vague sense that there are bombs somewhere, and then you die on the third click. This page is the guide I wish someone had handed me when I was a kid clicking around the Windows version.
By the end you will know exactly how the board works, what every number means, when to flag and when not to, and how to use the chord click that veteran players treat like breathing. I will also point out a few mistakes that look like luck but are actually just bad habits.
The board, in plain terms
Every game is a rectangle of squares. Some of them have bombs hidden underneath. Your job is to reveal every square that is not a bomb. You do not need to flag the bombs to win. You only need to clear the safe squares. The flags are for you to keep track of your own thinking.
Three sizes show up almost everywhere. On MineRace.io we call them small, medium, and large, but you might know them as beginner, intermediate, and expert:
- Small (Beginner): 9 columns by 9 rows, 10 bombs. About a 12 percent bomb density. Great for warming up or learning a pattern.
- Medium (Intermediate): 16 by 16, 40 bombs. Around 15 percent. This is where chording starts to really pay off.
- Large (Expert): 30 by 16, 99 bombs. About 20 percent density. The classic competitive size.
Your first click is always safe
One thing that confused me forever: the very first square you reveal will never be a bomb. On modern Minesweeper, including MineRace, the board is arranged so that your first click opens up a small cleared region with numbers around it. That region is your starting position. Every game gives you a foothold.
On MineRace.io, the opening is pre-revealed for you when the puzzle loads. You start with a small island of cleared squares and you go from there. The timer starts the second the puzzle appears, so do not stare at the board for ten seconds and then complain about your time.
What the numbers mean
Every cleared square that touches one or more bombs shows a number. The number is the count of bombs in the eight squares around it. That is it. There is no other meaning. A 3 means three of its eight neighbors are bombs. A blank square means none of its neighbors are bombs, which is why blank squares cascade and open up wide spaces.
Numbers go from 1 to 8 in theory. In practice you will see 1, 2, and 3 a lot, 4 sometimes, and 5 through 8 mostly in corners of dense Expert boards. Most of the game is reasoning about 1s and 2s.
Controls: clicking, flagging, and chording
On desktop:
- Left click a square to reveal it. If you reveal a bomb, you lose.
- Right click a hidden square to mark it as a bomb. Right click again to clear the flag.
- Click a number that already has the right amount of flags around it to chord. More on chording below.
On mobile we use a tap-and-choose flow:
- Tap a hidden square and a small popover appears with two icons: an eye and a bomb. Tap the eye to reveal. Tap the bomb to flag.
- Tap a flagged square and you get an eraser and an eye. Eraser clears the flag. Eye reveals it anyway, which is risky if you actually meant the flag.
- Tap a revealed number with the right amount of adjacent flags to chord. No popover for this one. It just happens.
Chording, the move that changes everything
Chording is the single most useful technique a beginner can learn. Once you have a number, and you have flagged exactly that many adjacent bombs, you can click the number itself to instantly reveal all its remaining neighbors. If your flags are correct, you safely open up a chunk of the board. If your flags are wrong, you blow up immediately. So you only chord on positions you are confident about.
Example. You have a revealed 2 and you have flagged two of its neighbors. The other six neighbors are hidden. Click the 2. Boom, all six open up. That is six squares opened in one click instead of six individual clicks. Over the course of an Expert game this compounds into massive time savings.
Speedrunners chord constantly. Watch any world record video and you will see the player flagging in tight loops then chord-clicking everything around the flag. It looks like a dance.
How to actually win
The win condition is simple: reveal every non-bomb square. You do not need to flag anything. The moment the last safe square gets revealed, you win. The remaining flags get auto-placed by the game as a courtesy but they were never required.
This matters because some players think they need to flag every bomb before the game ends. They do not. If your endgame is faster without flagging, do not flag. Flag only when it helps you think or when it unlocks chord clicks.
How to lose
You lose the moment you reveal a bomb. The board freezes, every other bomb gets revealed, and you see the one you stepped on highlighted in red. If you had flags placed on non-bomb squares, those get crossed out so you can see what you got wrong.
On MineRace, a loss does not delete your day. You can retry the same puzzle as many times as you want. We track your retry count and your time, and the leaderboard sorts by retries first, then time. So finishing without dying once is the fastest path to the top.
Reading the basic patterns
Most of Minesweeper boils down to a handful of patterns. You do not need to memorize them, you just need to notice them.
The single 1 on an edge
If a 1 is on the edge of the board with only one hidden neighbor, that neighbor is the bomb. Flag it. This sounds obvious and it is, but beginners blow past it constantly. Every 1 with exactly one hidden neighbor tells you where a bomb lives.
The completed 1
If a 1 already has one flagged neighbor, all its other neighbors are safe. You can chord it. This is the chording engine that drives a fast game.
The 1-1 pair
Two 1s side by side along an edge of the cleared region. The square that touches both 1s is shared. The square that only touches the rightmost 1 is the bomb. The square that only touches the leftmost 1 is safe. This is one of the first patterns where logic gives you a free safe square without any guessing.
The 1-2-1
Three numbers in a row, 1 then 2 then 1, with all of them touching the same edge of hidden squares. The two bombs sit underneath the two 1s. The middle hidden square, directly under the 2, is safe. This pattern is so common on Expert boards that learning to spot it instantly will shave seconds off every game.
The 1-2-2-1
Same idea but four numbers and three bombs. The middle two hidden squares are the bombs. The outer two are safe.
When you see one of these patterns, you do not need to think. You just place the flags and chord through. Recognizing patterns is what makes fast play fast.
Common beginner mistakes
Clicking randomly to start
On MineRace your opening is given to you. You do not need to guess at the start. Look at the numbers around the opening and reason outward. Random clicking is how you lose at second zero.
Flagging every bomb you see
You only need to flag bombs that unlock chord clicks or that help you think. Flagging a bomb in the middle of nowhere that you cannot chord on yet is wasted motion. Speedrunners flag less than you think.
Trusting your own flags
You can flag a square wrong. If you chord on a number whose flags are incorrect, you blow up instantly even though you did not click a bomb directly. Before you chord, glance at the flags around the number and confirm they make sense.
Guessing too early
On a properly designed board, you should never have to guess. On MineRace every puzzle is guaranteed solvable through pure logic. So if you are about to flip a coin on a 50/50 square, stop and look around. There is information somewhere else on the board that resolves it. You just have not found it yet.
The timer
The timer starts when the puzzle loads and stops the moment you win or lose. It counts in tenths of a second on our leaderboards. On the classic Windows version it ticked in whole seconds and capped at 999. MineRace tracks finer than that so close races resolve.
Where to go next
Now that you know the rules, the next step is learning to look for patterns and reason about probabilities on the few rare moments you do need to estimate. Head to strategies for that. If you want the full canonical rules in reference form, there is a rules page. And if you have been wondering what makes our puzzles different from random boards, read about no-guess mode.
Or just open the front page and play. Nothing teaches Minesweeper like dying a few times and then suddenly seeing the pattern.