Introduction
Minesweeper is a logic puzzle video game genre generally played on personal computers. The game features a grid of clickable tiles, with hidden "mines" (depicted as naval mines in the original game) dispersed throughout the board. The objective is to clear the board without detonating any mines, with help from clues about the number of neighboring mines in each field. Variants of Minesweeper have been made that expand on the basic concepts, such as Minesweeper X, Crossmines, and Minehunt. Minesweeper has been incorporated as a minigame in other games, such as RuneScape and Minecraft's 2015 April Fools update.
The origin of Minesweeper is unclear. According to TechRadar, the first version of the game was 1990's Microsoft Minesweeper, but Eurogamer states Mined-Out by Ian Andrew (1983) was the first Minesweeper game. Curt Johnson, the creator of Microsoft Minesweeper, acknowledges that his game's design was borrowed from another game, but denies that it was Mined-Out.
How to Play
Minesweeper is a puzzle video game. In the game, mines (that resemble naval mines in the classic theme) are scattered throughout a board, which is divided into cells. Cells have three states: unopened, opened and flagged. An unopened cell is blank and clickable, while an opened cell is exposed. Flagged cells are those marked by the player to indicate a potential mine location.
A player selects a cell to open it. If a player opens a mined cell, the game ends. Otherwise, the opened cell displays either a number, indicating the number of mines vertically, horizontally or diagonally adjacent to it, or a blank tile (or "0"), and all adjacent non-mined cells will automatically be opened. Players can also flag a cell, visualised by a flag being put on the location, to denote that they believe a mine to be in that place. Flagged cells are still considered unopened, and a player can click on them to open them. In some versions of the game when the number of adjacent mines is equal to the number of adjacent flagged cells, all adjacent non-flagged unopened cells will be opened, a process known as chording
This guide is based on information from the original source: Minesweeper Wiki.