A little less than three years ago, I was in the last few months of a job that I knew I’d be leaving. I didn’t have a lot to do (it was quiet–the doldrums of summer–and since I was on my way out, I hadn’t been given much work), and I spent a fair amount of my time starting at my computer waiting for the day to be over. The result of that time was this post about Minesweeper on my livejournal.
Now that I’m a month and a half away from graduating, I find myself unmotivated. It’s not that I don’t have much to do (quite the contrary, actually–I have a ton of work to get done), but I’ve been spending a lot of time screwing around on my computer–keeping up with my RSS feeds, playing solitaire, and, germane to this post, getting reacquainted with my old friend, Minesweeper.
Which is all a long way of saying, rather than write anything new today, I think I’ll just recycle that post. Enjoy this look back at July of 2005, and forgive my younger self’s ornate, doofy prose!
One of my favorite time-wasters in college, when I was supposed to be writing papers on post-structuralism and gender identity, was Minesweeper. I would spend blocks of 10 or 20 minutes at a time just trying to beat my best time. Sometimes more like an hour. It was pretty bad, guys.
So the point is, I got pretty good at it*. Good enough to scare people who saw me playing, my stupid mousehand flying around clicking and clicking and clicking. Good enough to develop fairly complex analyses of the intricacies of the game. So here’s my intermediate strategy guide to Minesweeper:
First of all, you’re gonna have to stop using the ? mark. Disable it, it’s just wasted clicks. If you’re not sure, don’t mark it at all. Your time is better used elsewhere.
Now, the right+left click. This is an essential maneuver if you’re looking to dominate Minesweeper. What it does is if you have this:
and you do the right+left click on the 1 square, you get this:
So no more manual clicking of all the individual squares. Another benefit is that this only works when you’ve marked enough mines to match the number on the cleared space you’re clicking (and it doesn’t work if you’re marked too many), so it’s an easy way to check whether you have already marked enough mines surrounding a numbered space.
All of these noted squares are touching the same number of uncleared squares as there are mines. Mark ‘em all, right away, and move on.
You know the 1 on the right shares its bomb with the 1 on the left, so you are safe to clear all squares that aren’t shared between the two (all the squares marked in red are safe to clear). 2008 edit: and you can also clear the square to the immediate right of those three–because of the pattern discussed immediately below.
Whenever you see this, you’ve got a bomb-clear-bomb pattern on the adjacent squares. Do you see why? (Hint: even if you don’t have a corner to work off of, this pattern will hold true.) Mark the squares across from the 1s as mines and r+l click on the 2 square.
This should be blind reflex, and after a while it will be. This is a big one.
Mark the two squares adjacent to the 3 and not touching the 1. They are mines. This also works, of course, in any other situation where the 3 is touching four squares, and you know that a specific pair of squares only contains one mine.
Each of these rules has numerous correllaries and implications that have become second nature to me, but much like a master of the Shaolin I cannot simply reveal my secrets–they must be earned with blood, sweat, tears, and carpal tunnel.
Now, onto my philosophical gripes:
If Minesweeper is supposed to be a realistic simulation of sweeping for mines, that first click shouldn’t always work out. Sometimes you should be dead right off the bat. And if they somehow have the idea that it’s not “fair” to kill you immediately, because you didn’t get the chance to make the “right” decision, then I take issue with the fact that in just about every game you end up in a situation like this one:
That’s right, it’s 50-50 and there is NO way to get around it with logical thinking. You’ve just got to put yourself out there and hope for the best. So, a strategy question: is it better to save these 50-50 shots for the end of the game? My answer is no. Better to get it over with right away; at least that way you haven’t wasted your time getting all the other mines, and if you do explode you can start on a fresh game sooner. Or stop playing, you pitiful loser.
Anyway, the fact that your first click is guaranteed not to blow up made me think. What if I just marked 99 mines right away? The answer is this:
and then this:
I guess it doesn’t work both ways.
* In case you’re interested, here are my best times:
I feel pretty awesome about them, but I’m sure there’s someone out there who’s beaten each time. 2008 edit: For example, me. My best time for expert is now 105. Kudos to you.
I have been playing Minesweeper for a really long time now, and at this point it’s pretty much just a matter of seeing if I can shave 1 second off of my best times. This is pretty boring, so I have a new obsession: Minesweeper without marks. It’s simple–you play as normal, but you don’t right-click to mark mines. All you do is left-click to clear spaces. You end up with games that look like this:
I have yet to make it to the end of an expert game like this, but one day I will, and it’ll be really really sweet. 2008 edit: I have since won some unmarked games. I am awesome.
2008 edit: Something funny is that because I had to reupload all these images (and update the links in the html), it probably ended up taking me as long to do this as it would have to actually write something new. But the key thing is that I didn’t waste the time on my schoolwork.
At any rate, all the pics from this set can be found here, although I don’t know why you would bother to look through them–they’re all right on this page you’re reading now.
That’s the end of our voyage into the deep past. Hope you enjoyed it.
Follow me on Twitter