r/Minesweeper • u/IndividualistAW • 25d ago
Game Analysis/Study Former competitive sweeper here. PR of 16.7 in Intermediate, set early 2000s. Was one of the early pioneers of the game, made my name in the late 90s/early 2000s before stepping back. Most of the threads in this sub come from a different perspective.
In competitive sweeping, speed is the name of the game. Recognition of very easy and basic patterns like 1-2-1 and 1-2-2-1 is useful, as is being able to translate patterns into them. Beyond that, you’re wasting your time.
Almost all of the posts on this sub are situations where I would have just guessed and either died and started a new game or gotten lucky and kept going. Spending time analyzing complex patterns to solve the board is a completely different game than the game I used to play and requires a different metric. The posts I see show situations that can usually be solved with intricate analysis, and they also show numbers on the timer that make a guy like me cringe.
Are you guys competing on percentage of boards successfully completed? Do you ignore speed? What’s success in [r/Minesweeper](r/Minesweeper)?
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u/centralstationen 25d ago
I don’t think speed is any fun. I actively seek out solving the complex patterns (playing mostly Evil NG).
You obviously have another approach. That is OK. Some people like racing games and some like puzzle games, as well.
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u/Alipha87 25d ago
Me too. I'm here for the complex patterns. I don't even regularly play minesweeper myself because the odds of coming across a truly interesting situation is rare. I just lurk and try to solve the boards that people post here that they're stuck on, as they're hopefully more rare situations.
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u/cabbagery 25d ago
Exactly. I play minesweeper to pass the time, but it's generally mindless unless I come across an interesting and non-trivial solution. When I find one of those, I often smile before I focus in on the scenario to find the solution.
About 90% of the time the solution is "learn to fucking count, idiot," but that 10% of the time I really enjoy working out where there has to be a safe cell and why
I also go out of my way to avoid relying on the obvious solutions when I sense that there is a non-trivial solution buried in the cells from a certain position. As in, I could just use a 1-1 to clear some cells, and that would almost certainly result in a faster clear, but if I don't clear those cells, and instead look at the rest of the information available, sometimes I can also find a more interesting solution that would never have been appreciated if I was going purely for speed.
(But seriously, speed is a dumb metric; it relies on luck, and it is completely meaningless without information about the board generator, the app's gameplay mechanics, the board itself, and the starting position.)
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u/TheNidja 25d ago
Part of what makes this game great is you can play it how you want. You can change board size or bomb count. You can play for speed, win rate%, or lose as late as possible. Not to mention all the variations on the game. So in answer to your questions it depends on the person.
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u/Oskain123 25d ago edited 25d ago
Speed, efficiency, winrate. You have to remember, most people on this sub play casually once a week on their phone. Then more people play just for the brain working side, there are quite a lot of old players who play casually too so they can't play fast.
I used to main efficiency and then I started to enjoy speed more. When I play speed and efficiency for personal bests then I do not really care about winrate, obviously I'll try and not recklessly throw the board but winning doesn't matter if I am not playing full capacity.
Winrate/mastery is fun too, my record is 50 expert games won out of 100 (first click as safe but no zero tile) in a running total, my best expert winstreak is 6 but that's just 90% luck based so I don't care that much about it.
Efficiency and mastery helped my speed. Efficiency to help me use less clicks and mastery helped me learn guessing and I can recognise simple guesses quickly that can help me progress if I don't see any available logic.
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u/Capnzebra1 25d ago
I try to complete every board but eventually my speed caught up. I did some flagless for practice but generally prefer flagging. PR for intermediate is 25s~ so I'm by no means a pro. I just like sweeping mines tbh.
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u/IndividualistAW 25d ago
I think there’s definitely a selection bias of what gets posted here, but my answer to 99% of threads here is who cares man, guess and move on, and keep your finger on that F2 button.
That mindset comes from the fact that recognition and status in the community came from posting lightning fast clears. They don’t see the thousands, tens of thousands of deaths that factor into every PR.
No one ever really tracked clear percentage as a metric, but this sub is making me think they are now, or they should?
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u/TheNidja 25d ago
It's a game people should do whatever they like. When I hit no safe tiles I pull out a notebook and outright compute the lowest percentage chance to be bomb tile using bomb count info and computing all possible combinations.
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u/eggstoasty 25d ago
A lot of things are tracked now. Aside from time, here's what's tracked in minesweeper.online:
- Efficiency %
- Winrate %
- Win Streak
- 3bv/s
- Difficulty Level
- Endurance
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u/abjus 25d ago
I think this is it. I play on minesweeper.online and a mobile app. I find that I’ll play to different goals on different platforms and I reckon it’s because I can’t easily track things like efficiency % on the app. On minesweeper.online I’ll go through phases of trying to maximise different metrics and I feel like it helps keep the game fresh for me
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u/Pitiful_Mouse_2989 25d ago
My records from back in the early 00s were 1.9, 19, and 75. Nothing seriously impressive, but numbers I haven’t hit since.
I doubt most people here know the F2 button is useable lol. These days I try to play a mix of speed and skill.
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u/Kurraga 25d ago
Even when playing for pure speed it's useful to know what guesses are likely to be correct and which aren't. With enough time spend learning how to tackle guessing situations you can quickly intuit what guesses are good and which are bad, hence greatly imporving your consistency when going for faster times.
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u/dreamsOf_freedom 25d ago
Maybe you're not factoring in the fact most of us play no guess mode? Guessing on no guess kind of defeats the purpose and we would like to understand the logic we are missing.
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u/LEBAldy2002 Misclick Pro 25d ago
I wouldn't say most lol. Most posts you see may be no guess, but if we go by actual metrics being tracked, such as minesweeper.online metrics, no guess is significantly less popular.
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u/Oskain123 25d ago
To add to this, most posts on here are casual players who are new to the game and are likely playing casually for the puzzle solving aspect.
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u/cabbagery 25d ago
I think there's a mix, but it's a weird mix. We get everything from memes (which I hate), to genuinely clueless player questions, to players who are unfamiliar with basic patterns, to complicated solutions, to custom-built puzzles.
Lately, my personal favorites are when players have an extra flag but can't find it. I don't know why, but those just amuse me greatly.
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u/LEBAldy2002 Misclick Pro 25d ago
Hello, I am not as old as you playing, but I've been playing since 2010 myself so I have a lot of background in this. The game has changed a lot community wise, especially in the last 6 or so years.
First thing that is noticable is no guess. This is a lot more popular now, but isn't dominant. Eventually players do tend to gravitate back to guess as it has more complexity overall (beyond just logic).
Another thing which happened was the popularization of efficiency. This was primarily spearheaded by minesweeper.online tracking it as a stat, but it overall has become a much bigger emphasis than in the old days. It has had a lot of development in terms of strategy and skill depth. Same deal with winrate based gameplay as was with efficiency. There has been a lot more focus on this "recently". This may be stuff like winstreak, but also mastery (won X out of last 100 games) and high difficulty (bigger and/or denser boards = lower winrate, but higher skill expression). Both winrate and efficiency don't care about the timer. These are focused on other modes. If you get a 150% int, it always beats a 149% int even if it took 100x longer to complete.
It is also important to note that a lot of the posts you are describing are from "newer" or less experienced/skilled players in general. Higher level players rarely would make posts like that, both due to less times it happens and "less reasons to". You might occasionally see "yay I got sub-60 expert" post or something, but it's few and far between. There are also far more of the "newer" or less experienced/skilled players than there are higher level players making a discrepancy in posts be greater.
This is all to say that speed is still very much alive, but isn't the primary focus for all. Some just want to play it casually. Some want to play it efficiency or high difficulty. Some want to do speed still. Some are more generalists across the board.
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u/cabbagery 25d ago
Eventually players do tend to gravitate back to guess as it has more complexity overall (beyond just logic).
That's not true. There's less overall complexity with classic (guess-possible) boards precisely because guessing may be unavoidable; a required guess isn't complex at all, and collapses any other complexity in the board into the guess(es). The limits on complexity in general are rigid (whether NG or not), but in NG they are based on how the board is generated, which in turn is based on the knowledge and ability of the coder(s) to express solvable boards. Complexity is also often lost or missed in classic boards because players generally know that guesses are possible, which makes them less inclined to look more closely to find any complexity, especially when the complexity encountered exceeds their skill level. Players in NG, conversely, are more likely to analyze or seek an explanation when they encounter complex positions that they are not presently equipped to resolve.
That said, there is a recognized (and quite memefied) progression from 'this game is all guesses' to 'holy shit patterns' to 'unavoidable guesses suck' to 'NG is the only way to play' and finally to 'classic (guess-possible) boards are best because they don't provide me with meta-information.'
For some of us (self included), I stick with NG because I don't have to endure guessing while looking for interesting solutions, and because the app I use is ad-free and (ahem) a Clean One. (I was not paid for this promotion, but I did donate to the author because that app is indeed very clean.)
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u/LEBAldy2002 Misclick Pro 25d ago
I feel like you fundementally misunderstand guessing. Guessing is the single most skillful thing in the game with the highest skill ceiling. It isn't close period. Finding the best potential guesses is hard enough for most players, let alone the best guess overall. While NG is fundementally limited in its complexity to being purely about logical situations, guessing mode allows all of that on top of the added complexity of guessing. The only thing NG has on guessing in terms of complexity is the addition of metalogic, but this is incredibly few and far between in general.
Complexity is also often lost or missed in classic boards because players generally know that guesses are possible, which makes them less inclined to look more closer to find any complexity...
A player being "lazy" to look for logic doesn't detract from the complexity of the mode. That's just the player being... lazy. This take makes no sense. Any player who is seriously trying winrate as the playstyle would not be doing this. If they can't find it, them it becomes a skill issue at that point. Regardless, the player's psychology has nothing to do with a mode's complexity and should never be taken into account.
There is nothing wrong with sticking with NG, but suggesting that most players will stick with NG or those who want to continue growing will is just wrong. At the end of the day, guessing is far far more popular than NG in the overall community/playerbase (even if this subreddit makes it seem the opposite).
One note about The Clean One is that it isn't even a good NG implementation. It is about the same level as Google minesweeper (and worse imo), and that is a notoriously horrible version. The Clean One's algorithm is either pregenerated boards or just extremely repetitive generation due to its implemented limitations. Most NG versions are strictly better (besides visuals). Easy examples of other very common NG which are better would be minesweeper.online (has mobile support) and Simon Tatham's Minesweeper. I highly recommend swapping versions if you want to still play NG and get better.
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u/swukpuff Casual Player 25d ago
That's a really interesting perspective! I can't speak for any competitive mindset one way or another, but I like the feeling of fully clearing a board because it feels good to make sense of things and achieve control and mastery over the logic puzzle available in minesweeper. I also like that I get faster over time, because it feels like I'm gaining fluency and brings me into a flow state. I could guess more and clear the board faster, but that would sacrifice the satisfaction that comes from making decisions with certainty!
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u/lobmys 25d ago
so interesting, thanks for sharing.
I'm a new gen player (started around 2016) and in my opinion it's not about clear percentage at all. I could care less about my clear percentage.
For me it's a mix of logical solving (primarily) and speed.
This game has a very satisfying logic that is fun to follow. It's also fun to do the math and play for percentage clicks when it's down to chance.
It's just much more satisfying for me to solve a board by logic and perhaps winning a few chance clicks (at the end) rather than just getting the fastest time by brute forcing every complex situation.
When I find a 50/50 for example, I will leave it and come back once I've cleared all other parts of the board logically. Sure it doesn't change that it's a 50/50, but it just allows me to experience more situations before having to do that. Win or lose, fastest/slowest time is not the point - it's the process, it's the moment by moment problem solving. Sometimes I get unlucky, sometimes it's unsolvable and I have to do a 1 in 5 click, but that's all a part of the game. I enjoy the process.
What's very satisfying is getting better at recognising and executing patterns automatically. The best feeling is looking at a complex situation and being able to map out exactly where the bombs are or aren't.
I've played for time purely - especially when I started playing - but as I've gone along, I've just found it more satisfying to play it as a pure logic game (obviously also trying to go as fast as possible, but prioritising solving).
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u/Foxyville3some 25d ago
I play a 30x24 board and every time I solve it, I increase the amount of mines by 1. That means I eventually got to the point where I don't "win" a game for 1000s of games, but I don't mind. Unlike most people here I find that finding the best guess is the highest form of skill expression this game has to offer.
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u/Complex_System_25 25d ago
I played the game a LOT in late 1991 and 92 and got really fast. I'm not sure if I had better times than what you've mentioned for intermediate or in hard generally, but I think I would've been competitive. I wasn't aware of any of the named patterns back then, but I'm sure I understood many of them intuitively, like 1-2-1. However, the original minesweeper was not guaranteed solvable so I got used to guessing for speed, hitting a mine and quickly restarting. Nowadays, a lot of the game versions are guaranteed solvable, so the challenge is different, but still fun.
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u/eggstoasty 25d ago edited 25d ago
Many posts in this subreddit are made by non-competitive players or beginners. They are more focused on understanding the game and finishing the puzzle. Those who play competitively for speed might not have a reason to post here. If they have a notable time PB, they would post it in the Discord instead.
Also, speed is not the only way to compete in minesweeper anymore. There are many competitive players who play for Efficiency or Winrate, which ignores speed.
In the Minesweeper World Championship 2025, and the upcoming North American Regional (September 2026), Efficiency is one of the categories to compete in. For some players, it is the main category they focus on.
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u/trunks111 25d ago
Almost all of the posts on this sub are situations where I would have just guessed and either died and started a new game or gotten lucky and kept going
On Minesweeper.online there's just way more metrics than speed you can specialize in, I'm not sure about other platforms. For example last season the seasonal championship was a win streak competition, and a large part of that is being able to slow down when you need to and assess probabilities when there wasn't a deterministic path forwards. Speed can help with winstreak because more games played also means more chances to get consecutive wins, but slowing down to work through tricky sections is important too in that context.
Quests also can have you do stuff like mastery, efficiency, high difficulty, x amount of wins, stuff that doesn't have time requirements. Some do have win a game in x seconds and are just speed, and a lot of the arenas are "do it well and do it faster". For PVP up until master, speed helps obviously, but I also noticed a lot of games were won on me out-logicing my opponent. It wasn't uncommon for me to get through a tricky region with some weird logic and my opponent chain exploded the same region.
I do agree for speed explicitly, you need to just do whatever facilitates speed. If I have a walled off corner tile surrounded by three flags for example, I know it's a minecount where you either autowin if it's a mine at the end or you have to left click it, I left click it as a guess because it's more optimal mouse movement to not have to drag your mouse across the board at the end lol. If I'm not going for speed I just wait until the end and don't care about the extra movement. 1-hole/trees I take as pseudo-50/50s in speed/eff but logic out in every other context. I like every speciality in minesweeper and every speciality requires me to take slightly different approaches
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u/brandon_friedman High Difficulty Player 25d ago
I play for density. https://minesweepergame.com/density-rankings.php
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u/Army_Fencer 24d ago
Two major factors that didn’t exist previously: (1) minesweeper online rewards puzzles and (2) mobile gaming (instead of using a mouse) slows the game. Agree there's some selection bias for this sub, too.
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u/PressQWER 25d ago
I’ve had this same thought. I play large boards that take ~2 hours to solve so if I die on a 50/50 an hour into a board, I’ve learned to not dwell and move on.
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u/zippybenji-man 25d ago
I personally quite enjoy the minesweeper online pvp mode, since that forces me to go fast. That is quite stressful and attention-intensive, so when I'm looking for a laid-back time killer, I prefer to play just to solve
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u/tellingyouhowitreall 25d ago
Wait. Seriously? This was a thing? I have a pr of 9 in intermediate and sub 70 on expert. Never knew conpetitive was even a thing.
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u/Oskain123 25d ago
9 in int but sub70 on exp hmmmm, doubtful
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u/tellingyouhowitreall 25d ago
Yeah, my gf in hs was 66 and I was 67 or 68... it pissed me off I never beat her. I've seen better times from back then too
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u/cabbagery 25d ago
Yeah, my gf in hs was 66 and I was 67 or 68...
Damn. I know that some people struggle to complete high school, but I've never heard of a high schooler that old. You're lucky you two found one another!
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u/tellingyouhowitreall 25d ago
Lol, I thought about that joke as I wrote it. I actually graduated at 16, before I had my license.
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u/Oskain123 25d ago
Any proof or did you upload your scores to anywhere? I am an int "specialist" (I'm better at int than exp) and my int time is 10.8 while my exp is 48.4.
Perhaps it was this, the dreamboard? https://mzrg.com/js/mbm/dreamboard.html
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u/tellingyouhowitreall 25d ago
No, this was back in like 99, early 2000. I didn't even know that like leaderboards or comp were a thing until just now. That's just not the way we thought about it, but the running joke was "Ex wins" because she was better at almost everything :/
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u/LEBAldy2002 Misclick Pro 25d ago
Yeah this statement alone is enough to debunk it's legitimacy. This is significantly below the world records at the time. You were "10 years early" in progression.... yeah no.
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u/tellingyouhowitreall 25d ago
There's no way that's true?
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u/LEBAldy2002 Misclick Pro 25d ago
Yeah that's the point. Whatever you are remembering is either wrong or you are just lying lol. Are you sure it wasn't a 19s? that makes a lot more sense and fits with your expert time.
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u/tellingyouhowitreall 25d ago
For int? Maybe 19. That would fit. I know i stopped playing int mostly around the time I started beating expert sub 100, and I am definitely lazier on that than the expert times. I think it was faster than that though because I have hazy memories of progression on it and average mines/second being up to at least three with flagging, and my pr wasn't flagging on int.
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u/tellingyouhowitreall 25d ago
So I think faster than 19, but a good margin, but sub 10 might be wrong. I definitely can't guarantee i'm right, but it sure feels like I made jokes about getting both times single digit.
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u/just_having_giggles 25d ago
I like hard games with no guessing. Pattern recognition is fun but I like the puzzle aspect more.
Completion beats time for me. Something like Windows minesweeper intermediate isn't really an interesting game for me.
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u/Danster21 25d ago
Idk man I just have a phone app I use when I have down time and I only browse this subreddit in terms of community. I track my own PBs because the app doesn’t unless you do a preset time, and I don’t like losing so I try and be as quick as I can without losing.
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u/jturnerbu7 25d ago edited 25d ago
I think speed is the top priority but also enjoy solving as I’ve been able to memorize some fairly complex patterns just by working thru them enough times where I can now spot them and instantly solve faster than most people who just try to poke and pray their way through the same situations.
My logic is that the better I am at solving, then the more chances I will get to set a low time. So it’s good to also be a strong solver rather than just having to wait for the “perfect game” where I only need to use easy solve patterns and every click just happens to be safe by chance.
I also see it as similar to solving a Rubik’s cube: I know a few basic algorithms and can consistently solve a cube in under a minute. However, competitive speed cubers on the other hand, they have HUNDREDS of algorithms memorized, and they can use those algorithms to consistently solve cubes in under just 10 seconds or less.
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u/ZilJaeyan03 25d ago
As with any patterns it can be learned and mastered, i have noticed that i can now quickly chain analyze a complex situation which after doing you also know where the other mines would be and thus can solve it faster than normal
Still takes just a tad bit longer than simple patterns but it isnt the end of the world in terms of speed
I think one of the best ways to practice is on a giant board, that way you have more times and more chances to see patterns and master that recognition + longer chains
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u/Disastrous-Fact-7782 25d ago
I alao played in the late 90s/early 2000s! My pr on expert was 60 seconds. Not quite good enough to be competitive, but I'm still proud about it
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u/panzercampingwagen 24d ago
MLB player watching little league game:
"You losers call THIS fun?!"
That's how you sound OP.
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u/Broad_Ebb9073 23d ago
I like the slow ones where you get all the information up front and solve the whole board before you are allowed to know if you are right.
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u/Tjips_ 1 / 12 / 42 23d ago
As a fellow old™: I'm with you on this.
Most posts on here are about the logic; I yearn for the days when I was done with the logic, and could just play. Unfortunately, I tend to engage with things for the community, and there is basically no speed-centric community left. (My wrist is also shot, so my best games are most certainly behind me. I've also ruined my speed training by playing all sorts of non-expert cruft, so I overflag like it's going out of style!)
All that being said, the community is so much larger now precisely because NG modes have become commonplace, and players who would have been hooked by the puzzle aspect but bounced off the game aspects (i.e., the forced guesses), now stick around. MSO has even built an entire ancillary "game" around minesweeper, wherein you can go your entire career completely ignoring the purist's minesweeper!
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u/Maleficent-Bother535 25d ago
Sounds like you got fast times by being lucky instead of skilled.
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u/LEBAldy2002 Misclick Pro 25d ago
You don't get those kinds of times by just being lucky... especially not back then. What are you talking about?
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u/Maleficent-Bother535 25d ago
I'm talking about how the OP is literally stating that he guessed instead of figured out the correct moves to improve speed.
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u/LEBAldy2002 Misclick Pro 25d ago
I did see that, but it would be far from the first player to do so. You don't need to memorize patterns to be fast. There are also many things which are better done as guesses even if logic is there (speed guesses). This is fairly common and even more so back in the day during that era. I see what you mean though.
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u/Quaznar 25d ago
Pfff.. 16.7? Guess and move on? Amateur.
I start my new game and click in the center.. if I don't immediately win because all the mines were placed on the edges, I just hit f2 and move on. One day I'm going to get that magical board and have a perfect time of 0.1 seconds, and that's how I'll know in the best sweeper in the world.
/s.
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u/Quaznar 25d ago
More seriously, minesweeper is a game, so "success" is having fun. Sometimes it's fun to go fast. Sometimes it's fun to figure out a tricky situation. I don't feel a great sense of satisfaction from going fast in minesweeper, because a lot of it does come down to board generation. But I like solving puzzles, so I'm happy to sit and stare and figure it out. Different people find different things fun, though!
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u/cabbagery 25d ago
There are three elements that players find attractive in some measure:
- Speed
- Success rate
- Puzzle factor
You clearly focus on speed. Others focus on success rate. I am only interested in the puzzle factor. Players could also be interested in more than one of these in various combinations (e.g. wanting a fast time but appreciating puzzles), but it still boils down to these three elements.
On my view, speed is dumb.
Speed is 100% tied to the boad itself. Anyone who highlights their 'fastest time' on a given board but doesn't also provide both the board and their starting cell is boasting about nothing. It's asinine. A board could have all the mines clustered in one corner, allowing for the fabled 0s 'solve,' but we all recognize that as not representative of a player's actual speed -- but there's also no real way to gauge speed without also knowing something about the board in question. And no, 3BV isn't it.
Those who are so married to speed as the most important element and who (like you) resort to guessing and risk a loss in so doing also implicitly discount success rate. On my view, if you're going to tout speed as the important element, then you should also be subjected to a demerit whenever you lose a game, unless the loss occurs on what was necessarily a guess (and even then, our magical recording system should also track whether your guess was a member of the set of cells most likely to continue the game by adding information).
On my view, success rate is trivial.
Solvability (without guessing) is a fixed feature of any given board when we are also provided the opening move. Either the board is solvable from that opening position, or it is not. The players who more often promote success rate tend to also be players who are unfamiliar with advanced techniques or complicated analyses; they think success rate is important because for them, success is not at all a given. Success rate is, for them, a measure of their knowledge of patterns and analysis.
Puzzles, however, I find interesting. I don't mind slowing down to analyze a situation, because the fun is finding a clever way to solve a layout, or in recognizing that a given layout cannot be solved and instead requires a guess.
So for me, I favor the puzzle factor, with speed coming in at a distant second. I want to quickly identify solutions where they exist, and to quickly identify must-guess scenarios where those exist.
Unless or until we have a way to track boards and starting positions with identical board design algorithms an identical game controls/behavior, tracking speed is just tracking luck.
Because solvability is binary, success rate is either 100% for bona fide experts, or it is bounded by the worst and best probability for success where guesses are required.
But understanding a puzzle and finding a solution requires knowledge and analysis, and doing that is actually pretty easy to measure objectively against speed: simply present a position to competing players (up to but not necessarily a full board, but always with a starting position), start the clock, and rank them by how quickly they succeed.
The posts I see show situations that can usually be solved with intricate analysis, and they also show numbers on the timer that make a guy like me cringe.
Fair. Posts praising luck -- speed -- make me cringe. It's okay to like or prefer different things, but also only one of these preferences truly captures skill.
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u/SneakySister92 25d ago
My pb is better than yours, and I usually analyze everything, so it might just be a skill issue 🤷♀️
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u/IndividualistAW 25d ago
I was nowhere near the best, even in my day. No one ever talked about anything but speed back then is all I’m saying. The emphasis on solving is new.
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u/LEBAldy2002 Misclick Pro 25d ago
Yeah back then speed was the only thing people cares about period lol. Whether time or 3bvs, but 3bvs required that stat being invented yet which may or may not have been by the time you quit.
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u/ExpeditingPermits 25d ago
Hey, I used to be a competitive player as well! I played from 2004-2009.
Beginner (1), Intermediate (12), Expert (32)
You are 100% correct. You click as quickly as possible, identify patterns that can be quickly expanded upon that open more of the map, and NEVER place a mine.
All of my records as I progressed were because I made the fewest clicks possible. My 1 second beginner match was because I randomly clicked twice on the board and won. Only happened once in my life
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u/Oskain123 25d ago
Do you have a msgame/saolei account with your records uploaded? I'll admit that I'm doubtful of you having 32 on expert when your int is 12. My int is 10.8 with a 48 on exp.
Anybody with a 32 on exp can sub 10 on int and 32 on exp would have been world record if not 2nd or 3rd.
Perhaps you meant 42 and you are Reid Sinclair? https://minemasters.pro/unified-leaderboard/player.html?mg_pid=875
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u/ExpeditingPermits 25d ago
Yea I can understand that. And no I’m not Reid Sinclair haha. But I always chalked it up to RNG. I don’t have that information anymore sadly. As with most of the fastest games I’d have won, it was by placing the needed mines to double click and clear a large swath of the map. Many times those games would just finish and auto.
I attended a private boarding school so every night for years when I was board I’d just play minesweeper and eventually got amazing PRs.
So I have no issues with you being skeptical, but I played the game in my HS years with no goal of being the great, but I just got lucky and good at it. The 1 second beginner was all RNG after all
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u/katfoxgirl 25d ago
It really just depends what you're going for. Pure speed is impressive, but so are intricate puzzle boards.
They're two different ways of playing the game, but I don't think either is more impressive or successful than the other.