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The board starts as a grid of covered squares with mines hidden under some of them. Uncover a square and it shows a number from 1 to 8 counting the mines in the eight squares around it, or opens up as blank when none of its neighbors hold a mine.

Blank squares open their neighbors automatically, so a single click can clear a whole region. Use the numbers along the edge of each cleared region to work out which covered squares must be mines and which must be safe.

You win when every square without a mine is uncovered. Uncovering a mine ends the game, and the board shows where every mine was hiding.

A number counts mines in all eight directions: left, right, above, below, and the four diagonals. A 1 in a corner therefore has only three neighbors to consider, while a 1 in the middle of the board has eight.

Flags mark squares you believe hold a mine. They protect those squares from an accidental click and lower the mines-left counter, but they are optional: the game is won by uncovering every safe square, not by flagging.

• Your first click never hits a mine. Mines are placed after it, away from that square and its neighbors, so the game always opens with a cleared area.
• The mines-left counter shows the total mines minus the flags you have placed.
• The timer starts on your first uncovered square and stops when the game ends.

With a mouse, left-click to uncover a square and right-click to place or remove a flag. With a keyboard, move between squares with Tab, press Enter or Space to uncover, and press F to flag.

On a phone or tablet, use the Sweep and Flag switch below the board to choose what a tap does. Hard's wide 30×16 board turns upright on a portrait screen so every square stays large enough to tap.

Click or tap an uncovered number once all of its mines are flagged to uncover the rest of its neighbors in one move. This shortcut, often called chording, saves time on larger boards. If a flag is wrong, chording can uncover a mine, so check before you use it.

GameCamp uses the three classic board sizes. Choose New game from the menu to switch, or press the button between the two counters above the board to start again at the current size.

• Easy: a 9×9 board with 10 mines. A good place to learn the basic patterns.
• Medium: a 16×16 board with 40 mines. Longer chains of reasoning and more open space.
• Hard: a 30×16 board with 99 mines. Dense clusters that reward careful flagging and chording.

Most of Minesweeper is pattern reading. Start with the squares that have the fewest covered neighbors, because they give the most certain answers, then work outward from what you have proved.

• If a number has exactly as many covered neighbors as its value, every one of those neighbors is a mine.
• If a number already touches as many flags as its value, every other covered neighbor is safe.
• Along a straight edge, the 1-2-1 pattern means the squares beside each 1 are mines and the square beside the 2 is safe.
• Along a straight edge, a 1-2-2-1 pattern means the two squares beside the 2s are mines.
• Compare neighboring numbers: when one number's covered neighbors are a subset of another's, the difference in their values tells you how many mines sit in the squares they do not share.
• When no square can be proved safe, guess where the fewest mines are likely, such as an open corner of the board away from high numbers.