Every rule of minesweeper, including the ones tutorials usually skip.
Most minesweeper tutorials teach you the two-minute version of the rules and leave it at that. This guide goes deeper: the full rule set, how boards are actually generated, what numbers can and cannot tell you, and the edge cases — forced guesses, chording, and win conditions — that confuse even experienced players.
A minesweeper board is a grid of covered cells. A fixed number of mines are hidden among them. You win by revealing every cell that does not contain a mine. You lose the moment you reveal a mine.
Note what the objective does not say: you do not need to locate every mine, and you do not need to flag anything. Flags are optional tooling, not a win condition. This distinction matters more than beginners realize — see our flagging guide for why some experts barely flag at all.
Standard difficulties and their boards:
| Difficulty | Grid | Mines | Density |
|---|---|---|---|
| Easy | 9 × 9 = 81 cells | 10 | 12.3% |
| Medium | 16 × 16 = 256 cells | 40 | 15.6% |
| Hard | 16 × 30 = 480 cells | 99 | 20.6% |
Mine density is why difficulty scales non-linearly: Hard has less than 5 empty cells per mine, so nearly every reveal carries information and risk.
In modern implementations — Bean Boom included — the mines are placed after your first click. The generator first takes your click position, then distributes the mines among the remaining cells, guaranteeing:
This is why the "start anywhere" advice is safe: there is no strategy for the first click because the board adapts to it.
When you reveal a safe cell, it displays the count of mines in its eight adjacent cells (orthogonal and diagonal). That's the entire information model of the game:
Two corollaries follow directly from this rule, and they generate every deduction in the game:
Rule of saturation: if a number's count equals its count of covered neighbors, all those neighbors are mines.
Rule of satisfaction: if a number's count equals the flags already around it, every other covered neighbor is safe.
Everything else — 1-2-1 patterns, subtraction logic, set reasoning — is these two rules composed together. We cover that machinery in reading the numbers and the pattern library.
Right-click (desktop) or long-press (mobile) cycles a cell between covered, flagged, and — in some implementations — question mark.
One warning that belongs in every rules discussion: flags can be wrong. The game never verifies your flags. A wrong flag silently corrupts every later deduction that counts it, which is why disciplined players flag only on certainty.
Chording is the least-known rule that changes everything about playing efficiently. If the flags around a revealed number already satisfy that number — a "2" with two flags around it — you can activate the number itself (double-click on desktop, double-tap on mobile in Bean Boom) to reveal all its other covered neighbors at once.
Because chording fires up to seven reveals in one action, it's the single biggest source of speed for fast players. And because it only works on satisfied numbers, it's safe — if your flags are correct. Chord on a wrong flag and you will detonate a mine. Chording is a trust accelerator: it makes good flagging faster and bad flagging fatal.
There is no score partial credit in classic minesweeper — a 95%-solved board loses exactly as hard as an untouched one. (Bean Boom's Egg Mode is different: it's a scoring game where chains and combos matter, and losing still records what you earned. See the Egg Mode page.)
Purists dislike this, but it's part of the game: some boards reach states where no safe cell can be deduced. The classic example is an untouched 50/50 corner late in a Hard game. When logic dead-ends, you must guess — the rules permit it, the game requires it.
Good guessing discipline:
No. The win condition is revealing all safe cells. Many strong players flag sparsely and win constantly.
Yes — in Bean Boom and all modern implementations, the board is generated after the first click. Your opening reveal can never be a mine.
Rarely, a board reaches a state where a guess is mathematically forced (like a 50/50 corner). It's not "impossible," but it's not fully solvable by logic either. It's an accepted quirk of the game.
Nothing immediately — the game doesn't check flags. But your deductions that count that flag become wrong, and chording near it can detonate a real mine. Wrong flags are landmines for your own logic.
Classic Mode follows all the rules on this page exactly. Egg Mode keeps the same rules and layers a scoring system on top — correct flags trigger chain blasts that reveal territory and feed combos.