The strategy is actually quite simple. But even with the best strategy it still depends heavily on luck.
this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2025
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The number is how many mines are adjacent. It's not hard until you're dealing with a 50:50 and no way to narrow it.
You gotta save those 50:50's till the end. The. See how many you can win with.
I always found it fairly easy. You just have to chose the custom field size with 50*50 fields and 10 mines overall and you are good to go.
Ah, memories. Chilling' in the IT lab at school, playing minesweeper during class when I hear my IT teacher behind me say "No, not that one, 2 to the left"
I remember reading the help file as a kid and then it made a lot more sense.
Speak for yourself!
Ngl I still play it regularly on my phone. Easy way to pass 3-5 minutes
Ah this is the game you click randomly at boxes and once it shows you lost, next player gets their turn.
So much fun.
I wonder what the numbers were for?
Nobody knew the cheat code for minesweeper
I used it to find out if you can explode a mine with the first click. You can't.
Not only that, it's always a zero that clears more fields, never a different number
Huh? In the Win 3.11 days the cheat only told you whether there was a mine or not, but not what number.
I guess you could take your time and see if any of 9 fields contained a mine.
Are we talking about the same game? You played minesweeper without numbers??
We're talking about the cheat code. It only showed whether a field had a mine or not. And if you want to be pedantic 0-fields don't have a number, they're just blank.
I was talking about the fact that the first click always is a 0 (or blank) field. So the board can't be already put before clicking so your cheat didn't make much sense to me. But I never played on old windows, earliest version was 98 for me so they might have changed that
There was a board before you started playing. But if you clicked on a mine of that board a new one was generated where that field didn't contain a mine. Thus it's ensured that the first click would always start the game. That first field could be one of any possible number from blank to 8.
Of course hitting a blank was preferred, but never guaranteed. And an 8 was very rare. I don't think I've ever seen that outside of custom boards.
I never knew there was a cheat code at all!
I like minesweeper, but the guesswork is frustrating. Fortunately other games have improved the concept. Hexcells removes the guesswork and adds more logic elements.
Dragonsweeper still requires some luck, but it has some interesting mechanics you can figure out on the end game screen. Also it's free! https://danielben.itch.io/dragonsweeper
I play a 3D version on my phone, it's called IED and I probably got it from f-droid. Recommended.
This is awesome! Thanks for the recommendation!