Minesweeper

See it live: renata-minesweeper.herokuapp.com

Application description

Minesweeper is a clone of the classic PC game. Features include:

• Players click on tiles to explore them, and win when all bomb-free tiles have been explored
• Bombs are placed after the first click, so players will never hit a bomb with their first click
• Players can right-click on a tile to flag it if they suspect it contains a bomb
• Bomb locations are revealed when the game is over
• A flag counter tracks remaining flags, and a timer tracks the elapsed time during game play
• If they win, players can enter a username to submit their time to the scoreboard
• Only the fastest time for each unique username will be added to the scoreboard

Feature highlight: recursive explore() function

I leveraged recursion to write an explore() function for the Tile class. The function explores all bomb-free neighbors of a tile, continuing to explore until it reaches a bomb-adjacent tile. The explore() function is defined in the minesweeper.js library file that is imported into React component files:

//minesweeper.js

class Tile {
  ...

  explore() {
    if (!this.flagged) {
      this.explored = true;

      if (!this.hasBomb && this.neighborBombCount() === 0) {
        this.neighbors().forEach( neighbor => {
          if (!neighbor.explored) {
            neighbor.explore();
          }
        });
      }
    }
  }

...
}

Future

There are a few features of the classic PC game that I have not implemented in my clone. I would like to add these features in the future:

• Players can choose to play one of three levels (beginner, intermediate, expert) with different grid sizes and bomb counts
• Numbers on tiles reporting the number of adjacent bombs have different colors corresponding to their value (1 is blue, 2 is green, etc.)