How to play

The goal

Mines are hidden under the tiles. Your job is to uncover every tile that isn't a mine. You never have to uncover the mines themselves, and you never should — touching one ends the game.

Uncover the last safe tile and you win, however many flags you did or didn't place along the way. Flags are a notepad, not a scoring system.

Reading the numbers

When you uncover a tile, one of two things happens. Either it's blank, in which case none of its neighbours are mines and the board opens outward automatically, or it shows a number. That number is the only piece of information in the game:

It counts how many of that tile's neighbours are mines. Nothing else. Every deduction you will ever make comes from combining those counts.

Controls

Two things you never have to worry about

1. Your first tap is always safe. The mines aren't placed until after you've clicked, and the tile you clicked is excluded from the draw. No game has ever been lost on move one.
2. Puzzle mode never asks you to guess. In the classic game a perfectly played position can still come down to a coin flip. Switch to Puzzle mode in Settings and every board is checked in advance by a solver — it is guaranteed to be finishable by logic alone, right down to the last tile. If you're stuck in Puzzle mode, there is something to work out.

What changes when the board isn't squares

The rules above never change. A number always counts the mines touching that tile. What changes from tiling to tiling is how many tiles count as touching — and that quietly rewrites every instinct you have.

On the classic square board every tile has eight neighbours, and after enough games you stop counting them consciously. On hexagons there are six, and the familiar 1‑2‑1 patterns simply don't arise the same way. Further out it gets stranger: on Kisrhombille an interior triangle touches sixteen other tiles, and on Triakis Triangular it touches twenty-one.

Two consequences worth knowing before you start:

• Higher numbers aren't harder, they're just bigger. A 7 on a board where tiles have twenty neighbours carries less information than a 3 on a hex board. Mine counts are tuned per tiling to keep the numbers meaningful rather than uniform.
• In several tilings, neighbour counts vary between tiles. Where a tile sits in the pattern determines how many others touch it. Look at the shape before you count — assuming every tile is like the last one is the single most common way to blow up on an unfamiliar board.

The advice, then, is simple: start on Square to remind yourself of the rules, move to Hex to feel the ground shift, and treat everything after that as a new game that happens to share a rulebook.

Difficulty

Easy, Medium and Expert each have presets tuned individually for every tiling, so "Medium" means a comparable challenge whether you're on squares or pentagons rather than a blindly copied board size. Custom lets you set width, height and mine count yourself.

Your best times are recorded per tiling, per difficulty, per board size and per mode, so a fast hex win is never quietly ranked against a fast square one.