Minesweeper Rules: How to Play
Minesweeper is a game of deduction on a grid with hidden mines. This page explains the numbers, the moves and how the daily board differs from the classic game.
Last updated: September 28, 2026
The board and the goal
The board is a grid of closed cells. Some of them hide a mine. You win by opening every cell that has no mine. You lose by opening a mine.
The number of mines is known from the start. The daily board on this site has 9 columns, 12 rows and 20 mines, which leaves 88 safe cells.
What a number means
An opened cell shows how many mines are in the cells that touch it: left and right, above and below, and at its four corners. A cell in the middle of the board has 8 such neighbours, a cell at the edge has 5 and a cell in a corner has 3.
A cell that touches no mine shows nothing. When such a cell is opened, all its neighbours are opened too, because they are safe. If one of them is empty as well, the opening continues. This is why one move can open a large area.
| Position of the cell | Neighbours | Largest possible number |
|---|---|---|
| Inside the board | 8 | 8 |
| At an edge | 5 | 5 |
| In a corner | 3 | 3 |
The moves
- Open a cell that you have shown to be safe. It reveals a number or an empty area.
- Flag a cell that you have shown to be a mine. A flag is a note: it protects the cell from being opened by accident and makes counting easier.
- Open around a number: when the flags around an open number are as many as the number says, its other closed neighbours are safe. On this site, pressing the number with the Open tool opens them together.
Flags are never required. The game is won when the safe cells are open, however many flags are on the board.
A first example
A row at the top edge of the board is open and shows these numbers. The row below it is still closed. The cells to the left of A and to the right of E are open as well.
| Column | A | B | C | D | E |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top row, open | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| Second row, closed | a | b | c | d | e |
The 0 in column A touches the closed cells a and b. A 0 has no mine around it, so a and b are safe. In the same way the 0 in column E makes d and e safe.
The 1 in column B touches a, b and c. We know that a and b are safe, so its one mine is c. Flag c.
The 1 in column C touches b, c and d, and the 1 in column D touches c, d and e. Both have their mine in c, which agrees with everything found so far.
The 0 is shown here for clarity. On the board such a cell is blank, and in a real game it would already have opened a, b, d and e by itself. The reasoning is the same.
How the daily board differs from the classic game
In the classic game the mines are placed at random, and the usual sizes are 9 × 9 cells with 10 mines, 16 × 16 cells with 40 mines and 30 × 16 cells with 99 mines. Such boards often reach a point where two cells are equally likely to hide the last mine and only a guess decides the game.
- The daily board is the same for everyone, so it has a marked start cell. The first move has to be that cell. It holds no mine and neither do its neighbours.
- Every daily board has been played through by a solver that never guesses. Boards on which it gets stuck are not published.
- A lost board can be restarted and played again with the mines in the same places.
As in the classic game, there is no undo.
In general, deciding whether a given Minesweeper position is consistent is a hard problem for computers; it has been proved to be NP-complete. The daily boards never need such reasoning: three simple rules are enough.
Common mistakes
- Counting only four neighbours. The cells at the corners of a cell count as well.
- Reading a number as a distance. A 2 does not mean that a mine is two cells away; it means that two of the touching cells are mines.
- Flagging on suspicion. A wrong flag makes the numbers around it look satisfied and leads to a wrong opening later.
- Hurrying near the end. The last cells are lost to a slip of the finger more often than to wrong reasoning.
Frequently asked questions
- What is the highest number a cell can show?
- Eight, when every neighbour of a cell inside the board is a mine. On the daily boards published so far, fewer than 1 in 100 safe cells show a 5 or more.
- Why does one tap sometimes open many cells?
- Because the opened cell touches no mine. All its neighbours are then safe and are opened for you, and the same repeats for every empty cell among them.
- Is a guess ever needed on the daily board?
- No. Every daily board is tested by a solver that uses three rules of reasoning and never guesses.
- Does a flag on a wrong cell end the game?
- No. Only opening a mine ends the game. A wrong flag is dangerous because it misleads you when you open the cells around a number.
- Does the time matter?
- Only for yourself. The page shows the time you needed, stores it in your browser and compares it with nothing.