New game: MineGlyph, Minesweeper with no guessing
Minesweeper is one of the most-played puzzles ever made, and it has one famous flaw: sooner or later you reach a spot where two cells could each be the mine, nothing on the board can tell you which, and you have to guess. Lose that coin flip and twenty minutes of careful work is gone. MineGlyph removes the coin flip.
How "no guessing" works
Every field starts with a patch already dug for you. Before a field is ever shown, a solver plays it from that patch using only what a player could see: the numbers, and the rules that follow from them. If the solver ever has to guess, the field is thrown away and a new one is dealt. Only fields it can clear completely by reasoning are kept. So if you hit a mine, there was a way to know, and the Rewind button puts you back just before the mistake to find it.
The meadow
The field is a meadow. Grass tiles lift off as you dig, flags are little pennants you plant with a long-press, and a number tells you how many of the eight cells around it hide a mine. Tap a number whose mines are all flagged to clear everything else around it at once. When the meadow is clear, every mine blooms into a flower.
Daily and practice
- Daily: one 12×16 field with 30 mines, the same for everyone, reset at midnight UTC, with a streak.
- Easy: 9×9 with 10 mines, a two-minute warm-up.
- Medium: 12×18 with 36 mines.
- Hard: 12×24 with 60 mines, a proper think.
Every size is laid out twelve cells wide so it fits a phone with finger-sized tiles. Three hints per field point at a certain move, or at a flag you have planted on safe ground.
Three patterns worth knowing
- A 1 touching one hidden cell: that cell is a mine.
- A number already satisfied by its flags: every other neighbour is safe. Tap the number to clear them.
- 1-2 along a wall: compare neighbouring numbers. The cells only the bigger number can see often hold the difference.
