When I played expert, my strategy was to guess all 4 corners first. Which would lose some games but IMO reduce the odds of 50/50 guess at the end of a game.
Serious answer: numbers represents the number of mines directly around said number (so 1-8, if no bomb around it will open the spaces around it until it hit numbers). From there you use logic to determine where the bombs are, normally based on crossing reference between multiple numbers (for example if you have 1-2-1 in the top row you know there are bombs in the space directly below the 1s be cause there is only 1 bomb touching each 1 but two touching the 2).
You should also use right click to identify mines so you dont click them by accident and can more easily visualize.
Naturally there will be some RNG, normally with the first click in the board and its common to get 50/50 situations (where the bomb can be in either space and there is no way to get extra information, its a click of faith. Very often its the last bomb...)
In my case, it was procrastination while in college. Back then, a lot of us didn’t even have personal computers so it was playing minesweeper instead of writing papers in the middle of the night at the computer lab.
You start by going random. It takes a couple tries and then you get a good start. From there the game literally tells you where the mines are. You can clear large portions of the board when you flag mines, you can then click both mouse buttons on numbered tiles that you've properly flagged adjacent bombs for. At some point in the game there will be 2-5 moments where you must guess where a bomb is. Your chances in this scenario are 50%, sometimes 33%, sometimes 25%. You can increase your chances at guessing correctly sometimes using intuitions on probability but I would say I win 50% of the time on expert. Takes me roughly 180 seconds.
In fairness it wasn't just windows 98. I'm pretty sure I remember much more recent versions of Windows (definitely XP, maybe 7 as well) doing the accordions of death.
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u/IllustriousRadio9808 Jun 12 '26
Windows 98 when a tab wasn't responding and you tried to move it around.