Minesweeper is a classic puzzle game that’s been around since the early days of personal computing. It’s a single-player game that involves using logic and deduction to find hidden mines on a game board.
The game board is a grid of squares, and some of these squares contain mines. The goal of the game is to clear all the squares that don’t contain mines, without setting off any of the mines.
How to Play Minesweeper
To start playing, you’ll need to open the Minesweeper game and select a difficulty level. The game typically has different difficulty levels, which vary the size of the game board and the number of mines on the board.
Once you’ve selected a difficulty level, the game board will appear on the screen. The board will be made up of a grid of tiles, some of which contain mines. The number of mines on the board will depend on the difficulty level you selected.
To play the game, you’ll need to click on any tile to reveal its contents. If the tile contains a mine, the game is over and you lose. If the tile does not contain a mine, it will either be blank, or contain a number that represents the number of mines in the neighboring tiles.
If the player uncovers a tile that is blank, then all of the neighboring tiles will also be uncovered automatically. This process continues until all of the tiles that do not contain mines have been revealed.
If the player thinks a tile contains a mine, they can right-click on it to mark it with a flag. This helps the player keep track of which tiles they think contain mines, and avoid clicking on them by mistake.
The game is won when all of the non-mine tiles have been revealed, and all of the mines have been marked with flags. The game can be lost if the player clicks on a tile that contains a mine.
There are some additional rules that make Minesweeper more challenging. For example, the player may need to avoid revealing certain tiles that are surrounded by mines, or they may need to uncover tiles in a certain order to avoid hitting a mine.
To increase your chances of winning at Minesweeper, you can use some tips and tricks. We have all the tricks that you can use to increase your chances of winning. Some examples are, you can start by revealing the corners and edges of the board first, since mines are more likely to be placed in the center of the board. You can also use the numbers on the tiles to deduce where the mines might be located, and mark tiles with flags to help you keep track of where you think the mines are.

Here are some tips and tricks for playing Minesweeper and increasing your chances of winning:
- Start with the corners and edges: Mines are more likely to be placed in the center of the board, so start by revealing the corners and edges of the board first. This can give you valuable information about where the mines might be located.
- Use the numbers to your advantage: The numbers on the tiles represent the number of mines in the surrounding tiles. Use this information to deduce where the mines might be located. For example, if a tile has a “1” on it and there is only one adjacent tile that hasn’t been revealed yet, that tile must be a mine.
- Look for patterns: Mines are often placed in predictable patterns, such as in a straight line or in a diagonal pattern. Look for these patterns to help you identify where the mines might be located.
- Mark the mines: If you’re not sure whether a tile contains a mine, mark it with a flag to remind yourself that you think it’s a mine. This can help you avoid accidentally clicking on a mine later on.
- Be careful with “chording”: “Chording” is when you click on a revealed tile that has already been marked with the correct number of flags. This can be a useful strategy, but be careful not to accidentally reveal a mine.
- Be methodical: Go through the board systematically and try to reveal all of the safe tiles before taking any risks. This can help you avoid accidentally clicking on a mine.
- Keep track of the number of mines: If you know how many mines are on the board, you can use this information to deduce where the mines might be located. For example, if you’ve already marked 10 mines and there are only 5 remaining, you know that each of the remaining tiles must contain a mine.
- Practice, practice, practice: The more you play Minesweeper, the better you’ll get at it. Try playing on different difficulty levels to challenge yourself and improve your skills.
Lets start with the game:
First, the code imports the Pygame library, which provides a set of functions and tools for creating games and interactive applications in Python.
import pygame
Next, the code initializes the Pygame library.
pygame.init()
Then, the code sets up the game window by specifying its width and height in pixels, and giving it a title.
screen_width, screen_height = 400, 400
screen = pygame.display.set_mode((screen_width, screen_height))
pygame.display.set_caption("Minesweeper")
After that, the code defines some variables that will be used in the game, such as the size of each tile in pixels, the number of rows and columns on the game board, the number of mines on the board, and two 2D arrays to keep track of which tiles have been revealed and where the mines are.
tile_size = 40
num_cols = screen_width // tile_size
num_rows = screen_height // tile_size
num_mines = 10
board = [[0 for _ in range(num_cols)] for _ in range(num_rows)]
revealed = [[False for _ in range(num_cols)] for _ in range(num_rows)]
The _
in the range()
function is just a placeholder for the index variable, since we don’t actually need it in this case.
Next, the code sets up some colors that will be used in the game.
BLACK = (0, 0, 0)
WHITE = (255, 255, 255)
GRAY = (128, 128, 128)
BLUE = (0, 0, 255)
RED = (255, 0, 0)
These are just RGB (red-green-blue) color values, where each color component ranges from 0 to 255.
After that, the code sets up a font that will be used to display text in the game.
font = pygame.font.SysFont(None, 30)
This loads a default system font and sets its size to 30 points.
Next, the code defines a function called count_mines()
that takes a row and column index and returns the number of neighboring tiles that contain mines.
def count_mines(row, col):
count = 0
for r in range(max(0, row - 1), min(num_rows, row + 2)):
for c in range(max(0, col - 1), min(num_cols, col + 2)):
if board[r][c] == -1:
count += 1
return count
This function uses nested loops to iterate over the neighboring tiles of the specified tile, and counts the number of tiles that contain mines.
Next, the code defines a function called reveal_tile()
that takes a row and column index and reveals the tile at that position, as well as any neighboring tiles that don’t contain mines.
def reveal_tile(row, col):
if revealed[row][col]:
return
revealed[row][col] = True
if board[row][col] == -1:
global game_over
game_over = True
return
elif board[row][col] == 0:
for r in range(max(0, row - 1), min(num_rows, row + 2)):
for c in range(max(0, col - 1), min(num_cols, col + 2)):
reveal_tile(r, c)
This function checks if the specified tile has already been revealed, and if not, reveals it by setting the corresponding value in the revealed
array to True
. If the tile contains a mine, the function sets a global variable game_over
to True
to signal the end of the game. If the tile doesn’t contain a mine, the function recursively calls itself to reveal any neighboring tiles that also don’t contain mines.
Next, the code generates the mines by selecting a random set of coordinates on the game board and marking those tiles as containing mines.
mine_coords = random.sample([(r, c) for r in range(num_rows) for c in range(num_cols)], num_mines)
for row, col in mine_coords:
board[row][col] = -1
This code uses the random.sample()
function to randomly select a set of coordinates on the game board, and then sets the corresponding tiles to contain mines by setting their value in the board
array to -1
.
After that, the code counts the number of neighboring mines for each non-mine tile on the board and updates the board
array with those values.
for row in range(num_rows):
for col in range(num_cols):
if board[row][col] != -1:
board[row][col] = count_mines(row, col)
This code uses nested loops to iterate over all the tiles on the game board, and if the tile doesn’t contain a mine, it calls the count_mines()
function to count the number of neighboring mines and updates the board
array with that value.
Next, the code enters the main game loop, which runs until the player either wins or loses the game.
while True:
Inside the main game loop, the code handles various events such as mouse clicks and the “quit” event.
for event in pygame.event.get():
if event.type == pygame.QUIT:
pygame.quit()
quit()
elif event.type == pygame.MOUSEBUTTONDOWN:
if not game_over:
mouse_pos = pygame.mouse.get_pos()
col = mouse_pos[0] // tile_size
row = mouse_pos[1] // tile_size
reveal_tile(row, col)
This code uses a for
loop to iterate over all the events that have occurred since the last time the loop ran. If the event is a “quit” event (i.e. the player has closed the game window), the code exits the game. If the event is a mouse click, the code checks if the game is not over and then calculates which tile was clicked based on the mouse position. It then calls the reveal_tile()
function to reveal that tile and any neighboring tiles.
Next, the code draws the game board on the screen.
screen.fill(WHITE)
for row in range(num_rows):
for col in range(num_cols):
rect = pygame.Rect(col * tile_size, row * tile_size, tile_size, tile_size)
pygame.draw.rect(screen, GRAY, rect, 1)
if revealed[row][col]:
if board[row][col] == -1:
pygame.draw.circle(screen, BLUE, rect.center, tile_size // 3)
elif board[row][col] > 0:
text = font.render(str(board[row][col]), True, BLACK)
text_rect = text.get_rect(center=rect.center)
screen.blit(text, text_rect)
This code uses nested loops to iterate over all the tiles on the game board and draw each tile on the screen. It also checks if the tile has been revealed and, if so, draws either a blue circle (to represent a mine) or the number of neighboring mines (as text) on the tile.
Next, the code checks if the game is over and either displays a “You Win!” message if all non-mine tiles have been revealed, or a “You Lose!” message if a mine has been revealed.
if not game_over and all(all(revealed[row][col] or board[row][col] == -1 for col in range(num_cols)) for row in range(num_rows)):
game_over = True
text = font.render("You Win!", True, RED)
text_rect = text.get_rect(center=(screen_width // 2, screen_height // 2))
screen.blit(text, text_rect)
This code uses a nested if
statement to check if the game is not over and all non-mine tiles have been revealed. If this is true, the code sets the game_over
variable to True
, displays a “You Win!” message on the screen using the font.render()
and screen.blit()
functions, and exits the game loop.
Finally, the code updates the screen to show any changes that were made during this iteration of the game loop.
pygame.display.update()
This code updates the display to show any changes that were made during this iteration of the game loop. Without this line, the screen would not update and the game would appear to freeze.