About the project

So, a week or so ago, I was browsing some GA's (I think they were from an event by Grogglz) and in a comment, someone said "It would be pretty cool if we had a SG Minesweeper to hide links", or something to that effect. I started learning to code a year ago and had been looking for a quick project to get my hands dirty, so my mind immediately latched on to the idea.

Well, after a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, I want to present the SG Minesweeper.

What is it and how does it work?

I recommend you read the project README - I spent a good amount of time trying to craft and hone it, but for those of you who don't want to do it, the short story is:

  • If you are a giveaway creator, visit the main page, pick a difficulty, paste your secret, and generate the link. This link contains the information on your puzzle difficulty settings (board size and number of mines), as well as the encrypted secret, that should only be visible after someone beats the game
  • If you received the link from a GA creator, it will take you to the game page, where a game will be created for you on the spot based on the difficulty settings chosen by the creator. Your goal is to reveal all the non-mine cells to win the game. Hit a mine and you have to restart. The position of the mines is random and changes everytime a game is created

What else do you have on the roadmap? Can I suggest a feature or a bugfix?

Quite a lot actually. I decided to release the game as soon as I felt it was playable, and leave a lot on the roadmap to keep me busy for the next few weeks while also gathering real-life feedback on how it's working (or not). Please refer to the official project roadmap before you make a suggestion, since chances are I already have it on my mind.

Feel free to suggest new features here. If you're a coder, create an issue on Github and we can take it from there.

Does it work?

I hope so. You can test by solving an easy puzzle (each attempt should take ~2 minutes) and join a GA for it. It's for Broken Sword 5 - the Serpent's Curse, L1+.

If for some reason it doesn't, let me know and I will do my best to fix it as soon as I can.

Hmmm, what about credits?

Full list here. For those who don't want to leave this page, special thanks to Carlo, RosimInc, yannbz, Grogglz, BEAUREGARDE, Vini1 and adam1224. And of course, all the people who are awesome and keep me coming back here everyday.

Is this safe for sending really important and sensitive secrets?

Heck no. This is a really, really, reaaaaaally basic implementation, and anyone with rudimentary coding skills or AI help will be able to bend my code backwards and extract the secrets in a heartbeat. That said, I hope this tool won't be abused. If you want to be truly safe, do not hide plain GA links, instead relying on SGTools

This sucks and I hate this

Please go easy on me. This is the first time I publish something like this, and my goal is only to make this community even better. Frankly, it's terrifying to hit the "Post" button, but I hope I hit all the right boxes. If you don't like it, just don't use it. I don't love Wordles but that gives me no right to shit on Yannbz or anyone that creates Wordles. So let's just be good people, how does that sound?

1 month ago*

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Reserved for updates and announcements

1 month ago
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Cool addition but says you BL me, thanks anyway :)

1 month ago
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Probably because you have a bad ratio and of the 3 games you gave, one of them was invalid.

1 month ago
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Yeah, but i feel like the reason you come to a giveaway site is cause you cant afford games...

1 month ago
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And who should give away the games then?

1 month ago
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Well I didnt say people shouldn't give away games, usually people give away leftovers or buy games specifically to give away just as kindness.

I and others dont have leftovers or money to buy games to giveaway.

1 month ago
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Ever wanted to create custom sized Minesweeper games? Me neither!

But for those who want, v1.0.3 lets you do just that. Go crazy!

https://postimg.cc/VJFQM04G
https://postimg.cc/4nRD81MH

1 month ago*
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Wow this is amazing!! Thank you!!

1 month ago
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You asked for it, you got it. If you start a game and receive no error messages, that means your board is solvable without guesses!

For players, there are no major changes in the look and feel of the game, for the most part. The only notable exception is that your first click will now always reveal an area, not a single cell (as it happened sometimes in the past). This is part of the solver logic, and ends up reducing a bit the maximum number of mines allowed in a board, but that impact should be pretty minor.

https://postimg.cc/64h0DD9w

You may also notice an eventual error message when trying to start your board - that means the solvability check failed, and your board is not guaranteed to be solvable without guesses. For those mathematically inclined, I did a lot of testing and my solver starts to really struggle above 20% mine density, and basically breaks above 25% mine density. Of course that also depends on board size, first click, mine distribution, etc. I tried to take most of the complexity off the UI thou, keeping only some cool nerdy stats in the error message, which can be quickly ignored. Refreshing the page and trying to generate another board MIGHT work, but is not guaranteed and in these cases, it's up to the creator to ensure their game has appropriate parameters.

https://postimg.cc/V5F2yhZg

Which, I also implemented! Now I warn GA creators trying to create a custom difficulty game about their parameters if they start going too wild, or entirely prevent them from creating crazy games. You want hard, fine, but I at least want it to be fair, so if a certain configuration is likely to fail the solvability verification, I'll do my best to prevent you from creating it. Preset difficulties are not impacted since their difficulty curve is already well calibrated.

https://postimg.cc/njS7Bpcd
https://postimg.cc/hhJQNFGR
https://postimg.cc/1fwn5p6k

These changes are backwards compatible, so any puzzle created so far should benefit from those improvements. If you find anything that's not working as intended, please let me know!

1 month ago
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Solved a particularly nasty puzzle but forgot to copy the secret? Worry not, now your secrets are safe (as long as you're still on the same browser lol)

https://postimg.cc/VSqZjDh0

In these cases, the board will be disabled. If you really, really want to play the same game again, you can click the orange button. But beware: doing so will erase the secret from your browser's local storage. Which means you'll have to beat it again to see the secret. With great power comes great responsibility

https://postimg.cc/YvfQRZt3

As always, if something doesn't work as intended, please let me know!

1 month ago
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Implemented chording. Now you can left-click on numbered cells, and if you've placed flags around it corresponding to the number on the cell, all adjacent non-revealed cells will reveal

chording.gif

Keep in mind - this will detonate mines if you misplaced a flag, so use with caution

mine.gif

There are also other visual upgrades, such as reduced gap between cells (WaxWorm), and responsiveness added for mobile devices (RobbyRatpoison). If something is not working as intended, please let me know!

1 month ago
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This comment was deleted 1 month ago.

1 month ago
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Smaller update. Biggest change is visual, I decided to take some inspiration from SG instead of the very generic visual identity I had previously. Like it or not, this was always the vision, so get used to it :)

I also introduced a "Question Mark" feature you can access by right-clicking a flagged cell. This allows less-skilled players to better manage their game, while being unobtrusive to newer players. The updated rules reflect that

https://postimg.cc/7JLkDJfg

There's also a link in the "Game" page back to the "Creator" page, which is minor but helps in terms of experience and navigation.
The update is being pushed to GitHub right now, but might take a few minutes to go live, so just keep refreshing until it works :)

1 month ago
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Update for v1.4.5

Mostly small visual changes like fixed header and footer. Should improve experience, particularly on mobile
I also implemented restart with the R key if you hit a mine. I couldn't find the original comment that requested it, but whoever did it, you got it!

2 weeks ago
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Great idea and execution! Also love the roadmap, had few of those ideas in my head immediately when I saw the board.

Wishing you best of luck!

1 month ago
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Heck yes! I love minesweeper!!! 🚩💣💥❤️

1 month ago
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Happy for it, like minesweeper, except the annoying 50-50s but for small ones it's no biggie.

1 month ago
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we got a new puzzle on the community, nice :)

1 month ago
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Yay, more puzzles!! I like playing minesweeper from time to time, probably the best one I have found is https://minesweeper.online/, if you want some inspiration for extra features. :) I especially like the No Guessing mode, but I'm sure that's not something that's very easy to implement...

Regarding QoL features, the big one I'm missing is auto revealing tiles when you've placed flags. So if you click on a 1 and you have a tile flagged, then all the other tiles in range are revealed.

1 month ago
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Interesting suggestion. I had never seen this auto-reveal, but I tested it on the link you shared and it works really well. I don't think it will be that hard to implement, thank you!

No guessing feels much harder, but I believe there should be documentation online helping to explain how to implement it. It's definitely something that doesn't matter that much if you're playing on Easy, but really starts to matter for the higher difficulties. And I'm sure someone soon enough will start creating Expert games (I regret including it already lol)

1 month ago
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thing I am missing is the first click always opening a space space to have starting information, I assume the places I played minesweeper alot on generated on the click instead of before like here to make it happen.

very hard to get started on this when you click a few random boxes and get a single number then end up clicking a mine.

now I need to beat my own expert record of 133 seconds...

1 month ago
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I'm placing mines after the first click, to ensure at least you survive one mine lol

It's definitely not a long-term solution but one thing that worked well for me was start with a click on each corner. Sometimes you'll hit a mine, but you wasted no time in doing so. Clicking on all corners usually clears a big chunk of the map, at least on easier difficulties.

While I could implement a check to ensure the first cell is always empty, hence clearing more of the board, I'm afraid of what unintended consequences that might create. I'll do some more reading on the science behind the game to see if there are some better heuristics I can apply here

1 month ago
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I wish all minesweeper implementations were that nice lol

1 month ago
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oh, i love this website! i don't spend as much time on it as i used to, but i always check at least a few times a month to check out the new seasons.

https://minesweeper.online/player/16469972

1 month ago
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Ohai! 👋 https://minesweeper.online/player/16741377

I've barely skimmed the surface with all the features that site has... :) But even for a casual player there's a lot to like!

1 month ago
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Works fine, Good job, well done!

1 month ago
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Bump!

1 month ago
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Enjoyed the puzzle greatly, thank you :)

1 month ago
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this worked well for me. Good job~ (૭ 。•̀ ᵕ •́。 )૭

1 month ago
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Que orgulho, Laranjinha

1 month ago
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🤣 🍊

1 month ago
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Era isso ou admitir que eu sou muito pior no campo minado do que eu lembrava.

1 month ago
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Bump, another addition to increase puzzle variety

1 month ago
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Great Puzzle!

1 month ago
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Nice!!! New puzzle!

1 month ago
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1 month ago
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I've heard google's version of minesweeper doesn't give 50/50 odds. I'm actually in the same boat on a split

1 month ago
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Minesweeper my beloved.

1 month ago
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Bump!

1 month ago
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Thank you, loved this still on Windows XP, something I might have occasionally played late past bedtime as a teenager :D
Sad to see you have blacklisted me though :/

1 month ago
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I love this idea!
I'm an XP & 7 minesweeper guy, who middle clicks (or clicks both left and right at once, when clicking on a revealed number) to reveal the squares around--if that number has already reached its quota of flags. I'm glad to see this on the list.

1 month ago
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Yeah, I wasn't even aware that was a thing when I released the game! But it sounds like a fun feature to chase

1 month ago
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More game options for puzzle creators is great. The sample puzzle you gave worked exactly as I expected so seems good to me!

1 month ago
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Nice ^^ Thank you for future minesweeping!

1 month ago
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Bump!

1 month ago
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Yaayy!! Its finally here <33
Also PSA-> You do not reply to reserved comments on any post. They are “reserved”.

1 month ago
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Hahahah and some people still wonder why they get blacklisted. The irony ...

1 month ago
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Works very nice :)

1 month ago
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awesome :D

1 month ago
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