Tired of having to guess in a game of minesweeper? Worry no more... we present you Mineswapper!
This is a variation of Minesweeper game where you only lose if the move is certainly wrong! This turns the game into a 100% logic game with no luck involved, and makes any ratio of mine/free space playable. This is a screenshot of what the game looks like with 50% mine occupation:
In early beta stage: I don't really trust the correctness of the solver.
The game Mines from Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection is also a minesweeper variant where you never have to guess to complete a puzzle. There are others. How does Mineswapper compares to them?
Well, they actually play differently. For the same size and number of mines, Simon Tatham's Mines actually feels easier for experienced minesweeper players. That is because that game is fully solved upon the first click, before being presented to the player, and is rearranged until the solver can find a configuration with no guesses needed. This means you will always play on a curated board, where you will often be able to find familiar patterns that leads to a solution.
Mineswapper feels harder at first, because the board is not curated, and like in classic minesweeper, you will often get patterns that seems to have no certain solution. But that is not really true in Mineswapper, and any possible solution is a valid solution (at least until new clues are revealed). Once you learn to take full advantage of this non-determinism, you might find Mineswapper actually easier (but I am not so sure).
What is most interesting, though, is that in Mineswapper you can play with any ratio of mines to free spaces. I guess the most challenging should be around 50% of mine occupation, where you have to worry of a long chain of consequences when committing to a move. This is in contrast to Simon Tatham's Mines, where a 50% occupation will give you a very easy game where all mines had to be clustered together outside the playing area, for manageable solvability.
-
Display why the player lost. This is not trivial in the non-deterministic variant, as the game will have to prove it is impossible to find a mine configuration that leaves the field in a consistent configuration.
-
Obey the real probabilities of a given configuration to manifest. Right now, when committing to a given mine configuration as the player opens new spaces, the chances are not consistent with uniform random distribution of mines.
-
Improve performance on the corner cases. This may not be always possible, as the problem of finding if there is a valid mine configuration for a given minesweeper field is NP-Hard. If you play normally as you would do in a normal minesweeper game, the problem is still easy enough that it does not interfere with the gameplay. But if you start doing crazy things, expect to wait many minutes of 100% CPU usage for your move to complete.
-
Web version using
iced_web. -
Polish the interface.
-
Scoreboard? Maybe online? Maybe use denuvo anti-cheat to prevent tampering with the scoreboard?
This work is licensed under Apache License 2.0.