Introduction

Minestein is a version of the famous Minesweeper game. But, unlike the original Minesweeper, in its default mode Minestein will always produce puzzles that can be solved using logic - no guessing is required. For traditionalists, Minestein also has an "Original" mode which is equivalent to the standard program. If users get stuck or are still learning, Minestein has a button providing a two stage hint mechanism, plus "show answer" and "show solution" buttons. It can produce puzzles with a minimum difficulty rating. The Python source code is included in the download.

Overview

Figure 1 shows a typical view of Minestein soon after a puzzle has been started. The figure legend gives an overview of the game play.

What is Minesweeper?

For those that don't know, the aim of the game is to find the location of all the mines hidden in a grid. To start the game the user left clicks anywhere on the grid. This reveals the content of a few cells around that position. Content is either a mine or a count of the number of mines that touch the cell, zero being shown as a blank cell. Apart from those at the edge of the grid, each cell touches 8 other cells (up, down, left, right and four diagonals). The user left clicks, in turn, on the cells that he believes to be unmined. This left clicking reveals the contents of the cell. If the cell is unmined the touching mine count is shown. If the cell is mined the game is over and the user has failed. Success comes when all the unmined cells are revealed. Optionally the user can mark the cells that are thought to be mined. This is done using a right click and places a flag in the cell without revealing its contents.

As mentioned above, an important characteristic of Minestein, and one which separates it from the original Minesweeper, is that it produces puzzles that can be solved logically. To many this will be seen as a great advantage. If they get stumped users can resort to a hint system.

News

Version 0.03 released: Expert mode logical puzzle creation time reduced by a factor of 1/260!

Version 0.02 released: halved the time taken to generate puzzles that can be solved by logic - though it is still too slow for large grids with many mines.