A game about mines that millions of people played at work

In 1999, an Italian man named Sergio Chiodo looked at the little grey game that came free with Windows and decided it was in poor taste. Real minefields kill and maim people. So he started the International Campaign to Ban Winmine and asked Microsoft to swap the mines for flowers.

Microsoft did it. Italian copies of Windows 2000, ME and XP shipped with Prato fiorito, which means “Flower Field.” Same grid, same numbers, same rules. Even the explosion sound got replaced with a little melody.

I love that story because it shows the game was NEVER about the mines. The mines are set dressing. The real game is a grid of numbers and one question: what do you know for sure, and what are you only hoping?

That’s why our version has bees and critters. You can change the theme and keep the brain workout. This page tells you where the game came from, then hands you over to the Meadow.

Before Windows: a worm, a minefield and a man writing BASIC

Most people think Minesweeper started at Microsoft. It started in Britain, on a computer that plugged into your TV.

In early 1983, a programmer named Ian Andrew released Mined-Out on the ZX Spectrum. He wrote most of it in BASIC, which was unusual for a game you paid money for back then. Quicksilva published it after Andrew answered their ad looking for new games.

Mined-Out worked like this. You started at the bottom of a grid and walked to the top, one square at a time. A detector told you how many mines sat right beside you, above, below, left or right. It never told you where. Step on one and you died on the spot. No hearts, no second chance.

Andrew piled on the pressure level by level. From level two, “Damsels” appeared for you to rescue for bonus points. From level four, a moving mine called The Bug chased you around the field. From level six, the path behind you disappeared, so you couldn’t back out of a mistake. The prize after nine levels was rescuing Bill the Worm, a captive movie star.

You read that right. The ancestor of the most serious-looking game on every office PC ends with you saving a worm celebrity.

Andrew believes Microsoft copied his game. Microsoft’s programmer says the design came from a different game, an unnamed Macintosh clone. I can’t settle that argument and I won’t pretend to. I can tell you the core idea was out in the world by 1983: hidden danger, and numbers that count what’s touching you.

Other programmers kept circling the idea. In 1987, Tom Anderson wrote a version called Mines for SunOS, the system that ran Sun workstations in universities and labs. In 1990 someone ported it to X Windows. Programmers passed these games around the way kids pass around a good playground game.

1990: two Microsoft guys and a game called Mine

The version you know came from Robert Donner and Curt Johnson at Microsoft. Johnson had written an earlier version for OS/2, and Donner built his on top of it. They called it Mine.

On 8 October 1990, Microsoft shipped it in the Microsoft Entertainment Pack for Windows. Windows 3.0 was about five months old. A product manager named Bruce Ryan pushed for the game pack because he wanted home PC owners to have a reason to buy Windows. Games were the carrot.

The carrot worked. In 1992, Minesweeper went into Windows 3.1 itself, taking the spot Reversi used to have. From then on it came with every version of Windows from 3.1 to Windows 7. That’s 1992 to 2009, seventeen years of the same grey grid, the same smiley-face button and the same three levels:

• Beginner: a small board with 10 mines
• Intermediate: 16 by 16 with 40 mines
• Expert: 30 by 16 with 99 mines

You’ll often hear that Microsoft bundled Solitaire to teach people to drag with a mouse, and Minesweeper to teach them to click with care and use the right button. I’ve seen the story told many times, but I can’t find Microsoft saying it on the record, so treat it as folklore. It fits, though. Right-clicking to plant a flag was a strange new move in 1990.

Bill Gates got hooked too. In 1994, The Washington Post reported that he deleted Minesweeper from his own computer because he was playing it too much, then went and played it on a colleague’s computer instead. I find that comforting.

The little secrets inside the old version

Old Minesweeper had quirks that players still talk about.

Type xyzzy, press Shift and Enter, and a single pixel in the top-left corner of your screen would show you whether the tile under your mouse hid a mine. A cheat code, sitting in plain sight. The word xyzzy comes from Colossal Cave Adventure, a text game from the 1970s, so Donner and Johnson were tipping their hat to an older game too.

The timer cheated a little in the other direction. Windows Minesweeper counts time a bit slower than a real clock. The early versions also nudged the game window up one pixel every time you changed difficulty. Switch levels enough times and your game would creep up your screen.

Donner and Johnson didn’t plan any of that. Build a small game fast, hand it to millions of people for twenty years, and those people will find every odd corner of it.

The flowers, and the mine that was never a land mine

Back to Sergio Chiodo. His campaign started in 1999 and argued that the game insulted the victims of land mines. Microsoft’s answer in Italy was Prato fiorito: a big green flower in Windows ME and 2000, and a shiny yellow one in XP.

When Windows Vista came out in 2007, Microsoft rebuilt Minesweeper and added a tile set with flowers in place of mines for everyone. In some regions the game started on flowers by default.

Raymond Chen, a long-time Microsoft engineer who writes about Windows history, added a funny footnote. He pointed out that the picture in the classic game shows a naval mine, the round spiky kind that floats in the sea, not a land mine. He also admitted that was scant consolation.

Then Windows 8 arrived in 2012, and Minesweeper stopped coming in the box. It moved to the Microsoft Store as a separate free download, and the Windows 10 version shows ads. After two decades sitting in the Start menu, it now needs installing.

Our flags in Minesweeper Rescue are flowers too. Call it a small nod to Sergio.

Harder than it looks

This next part surprised me most.

In 2000, a mathematician named Richard Kaye published a paper in The Mathematical Intelligencer called “Minesweeper is NP-complete!” In plain words: checking whether a Minesweeper board is even possible, given the numbers showing, belongs to a family of problems that computers find hard. Find a fast, perfect way to solve one problem in that family and you’ve solved them all. The Clay Mathematics Institute has offered one million US dollars to whoever settles whether that can be done. Nobody has collected it.

Kaye went further later and showed that Minesweeper on an endless board can, in theory, do anything a computer can do.

So the little game on the office PC is tangled up with a million-dollar math problem. I love that.

Then you have the speed players. In 2014, Kamil Murański from Poland set a Guinness World Record by finishing Beginner, Intermediate and Expert in a combined 38.65 seconds. The official rankings now list a faster combined time of 32.88 seconds, by Ze-En Ju. In 2025, players gathered in Madrid, Spain, for the Minesweeper World Championship.

32.88 seconds for all three boards. Most of us need longer than that to clear Beginner.

Why ours has bees and critters

Now our part. I build these games at home with my kids: simple browser games, an old classic with one twist, free, no download.

Classic Minesweeper is all avoidance. You win by not dying. That’s a cold job for a kid, and for plenty of adults. So we flipped the goal. In Minesweeper Rescue, critters are lost in the field and you’re there to find them. Find every critter on the map and you’ve won, even with half the field still covered. You dig toward something now.

The bees replace the mines. They’re asleep, and a sting costs you a heart instead of ending the game. You get three. That one change makes the game forgiving enough that a young player can make a mistake, wince, and keep going. Lose all three hearts and the bees wake up, and you try the level again.

The rest stays true to the classic:

• The numbers mean the same thing. A 2 means two bees touch that tile.
• Your first dig is always safe. The game places the bees after your first tap, never under it or right beside it.
• Flags are flowers. Long-press, right-click, or switch on Flag mode.
• Tap a number once its bees all have flowers and the game opens the rest of its neighbors for you. Old players call this chording.

You get 100 levels across five fields: Meadow, Orchard, Pond, Hedgerow and Wildwood, 20 levels each. Every level adds a bee or so, and each new field is bigger, with more critters to find. Clear a level to unlock the next. You earn a star for every heart you finish with, so three stars means you never got stung.

That’s the real history. The next part is made up.

Tales from the Meadow

Everything in this section is invented. It’s the story of the game’s world, written for fun.

Field 1: The Meadow and the Long Nap

Every summer, the bees of the Meadow work so hard on the clover that they fall asleep wherever they land. The critters call it the Long Nap. The bees sleep under the turf, curled up in the warm soil, and they hate being woken.

The trouble started on the first morning of the Long Nap, when a frog named Pip decided to take a shortcut home. Pip hopped onto the turf, heard a snore under his foot, and froze. He couldn’t go forward. He couldn’t go back. So he did the one sensible thing a frog can do. He sat still and waited for someone clever.

A hedgehog and a ladybug got stuck the same way that morning. That makes three critters, scattered across eight rows of grass, and nine bees snoring between them.

That’s where you come in. The old diggers of the Meadow had a trick for this. Dig a tile and the soil remembers how many sleeping bees lie next to it. The soil can’t point. It can only count. So you count with it.

Field 2: The Orchard and the snail who counted

Past the Meadow’s fence sits the Orchard, where the trees drop fruit all summer and the bees nap thick under the windfalls. Twelve of them, by the snail’s count.

The snail’s name is Mo, and she has counted everything in the Orchard for as long as anyone can remember. Fallen apples. Clouds. The number of times the farmer’s dog barks at nothing. When the Long Nap came, Mo counted the bees too, from the safety of a high branch. Then she made the mistake she still won’t talk about. She climbed down to tell the others.

Now Mo is somewhere in the grass with three friends, waiting. She left her numbers in the soil the way she always does.

If you get stung here, don’t take it personally. The Orchard catches everyone the first time. Mo will tell you to watch the corners. A corner tile only has three neighbors, so a number there tells you more than the same number in the open field.

Field 3: The Pond and the missing chick

The Pond runs longer than it is wide, eleven rows down to the water’s edge, and the reeds hide sixteen sleeping bees.

Five critters went missing here. One was a chick who wanted to see the water up close. Another was the turtle who promised to keep an eye on her. The duck says it wasn’t her fault. The turtle says nothing at all, which the others find suspicious.

The duck swears the bees by the water always sleep in lines along the bank. They don’t, not always. She’s right about one thing, though. A long run of 1s beside the edge of the field deserves a slow read before you dig.

Field 4: The Hedgerow and the rabbit’s map

The Hedgerow is a tangle. Twelve rows, ten across, and twenty-one bees asleep in the roots.

A rabbit named Juniper drew a map of it once, on the back of a leaf. It was a beautiful map. She marked every safe path and every bee, and she was so proud of it that she showed it to everyone she met. Then the wind took it.

Six critters are lost in the Hedgerow now, Juniper among them. All that’s left of her map is the lesson she learned drawing it. She had marked one bee where there wasn’t one, and she trusted that mark later. It sent her down the wrong path, straight into the roots.

Mark only what you’re sure of. A flower in the wrong place is worse than no flower at all.

Field 5: The Wildwood and the butterfly

Nobody walks into the Wildwood on purpose. It’s the biggest field, fourteen rows deep, and twenty-seven bees sleep under the moss. Light falls through the trees in patches, so half the time you’re reading numbers in the shade.

Seven critters ended up in there. Most of them followed the butterfly. The butterfly says she was following the path. There isn’t a path. There never was.

The old diggers say the Wildwood is where you finally run out of easy answers. Sooner or later you’ll reach a spot where the numbers can’t decide for you: two tiles, one bee, fifty-fifty. Everyone hits it. Take the guess, take the sting if it comes, and keep going. You’ve got three hearts for a reason.

When you find the last critter, the Wildwood goes quiet. The bees keep snoring. Every critter you rescued walks home through the Meadow together, and Pip leads the way. He’s been practicing the shortcut.

How to play

• Tap a tile to dig. A number tells you how many bees touch that tile, counting all eight neighbors, diagonals included.
• A tile with no bees around it opens its neighbors for you.
• To mark a bee, plant a flower: long-press on a phone, right-click on a computer, or switch on Flag mode and tap.
• Tap a number once all its bees have flowers, and the game digs the rest of its neighbors in one go.
• Find every critter on the level to win. Each sting costs a heart. Lose all three and the bees wake up.
• The keyboard works too: arrow keys to move, Enter or Space to dig, F to plant a flower.
• Sound is on to start. Tap 🔊 to mute, or 🎵 for music.

Strategy: read the board, stop guessing

Most stings come from rushing. These patterns do most of the work for you.

Start in the middle. Your first dig is always safe and always opens a patch. A middle tile gives that patch room to spread in every direction.

Lonely 1s. If a 1 touches only one covered tile, that tile hides a bee. Plant a flower on it.

Satisfied numbers. Once a number has as many flowers around it as its value, every other covered neighbor is safe. Tap the number and they all open.

The 1-1 pattern. Two 1s sit side by side along the edge of the open area. If both touch the same two covered tiles, and the second 1 touches one extra covered tile, that extra tile is safe. The single bee already sits in the shared pair.

The 1-2-1 pattern. Three numbers in a row along a straight edge read 1, 2, 1. The bees sit beside the two 1s, and the tile beside the 2 is safe.

The 1-2-2-1 pattern. Four numbers along a straight edge read 1, 2, 2, 1. The bees sit beside the two 2s, and the tiles beside the two 1s are safe.

Critters carry numbers too. A rescued critter may show a small number in its corner. Read it like any other number.

Critters hide out in the covered field. Whenever it can, the game places critters outside the patch your first dig opens. If that first patch is big and empty, relax. Your critters are out there under the turf.

Watch the bee counter. The counter at the top shows the bees left minus your flowers. Near the end of a level, that number can settle a guess. If one bee is left and only one covered spot can hold it, you’re done.

Flag only what you’re sure of. A wrong flower makes a number look satisfied when it isn’t, and tapping that number will get you stung. Ask Juniper.

When you must guess, guess early. Sometimes two tiles share one bee and nothing else helps. Make that guess before you’ve spent ages on the rest of the level. A covered tile far from any numbers often carries better odds than a true fifty-fifty.

Your turn

Level 1 sits right at the top of this page. Pip is still sitting in the grass, waiting for someone clever. Scroll up, find the frog, and see how many hearts you finish with.