Interesting. My first impression was, "What?" Then, "Oh. Cool!" Then, "There's a lot more times that you must just guess." Then, "I wonder if there are some mad techniques for guessing?"

For example, in regular minesweeper, I would take guesses based on a rough estimate of the probability of a mine (or blank) occupying a certain space. I based it on the number of bombs I knew were in a given area, the total number of bombs left, and total number of squares left. It worked quite well.

I haven't found any similar technique here. However, I do feel a lot less like a computer could do a better job at it than I could.

Bugs I've seen so far:
I found that I could drag a flag onto an already-flagged square to run down the number of available flags. I didn't test what happens when it hits zero; I'm guessing you get stuck in sweeper limbo.

Also, it's possible to click and explode mines that have been exposed by a shovel.

It also ran very slow, but that could just be because I'm running 2^39062500 in the background.

Mechanical suggestions:
Why limit the number of flags at all?
A "bombs remaining" counter would be nice.
Dragging flags is incredibly tedious. Couldn't you do a platform-neutral modifier-click, like shift, to flag mines?

Visual suggestions:
The horizontal lines are easy to follow, but the diagonals got a little hard on the eyes. Once you get a mishmash of flags out there, there's quite a lot of visual ambiguity in the diagonals--what I mean to say is, the eye has a hard time following the line, and you have to check closely and convince yourself that you're still on the same diagonal you started with. Alternating shading would be awesome.

It would be very useful to grey out or otherwise identify lines that have been "satisfied" so you can block them out of visual scans.

That's it for now.

The main difference between this and regular minesweeper is that with this, you get all the information at the start and have to use it to deduce where the mines are. In normal minesweeper, you get nothing at the start except a free go, and you uncover information as you uncover safe ground. In minesweeper, you can almost always complete the board with pure logic, but this one needs quite a bit of guesswork. One thing I'm confused about is the number of spades you're given. I can start two games with exactly the same settings, but in one I get 1 spade and in the other I get 2.

In other news, I once completed beginner minesweeper in 7 seconds.
Edit: In other other news, I have just now completed beginner minesweeper in 1 second. Seriously. This deserves a smiley.

I've found 2 glitches now.

1) If you play on a small board with a high density, it's possible that all the squares have mines on them and so the game would be impossible. Similarly, if you play on a small board with a low density, you sometimes get a mine-free zone.

2) If you complete a game, then quickly start a new one before the 'Well Done' animation finishes, you get shown where all the mines are on the new game board.

Last edited by mathsyperson (2005-11-20 23:03:21)

I found it a bit addictive, too!

No, I haven't worked on it for a few weeks. Waiting for a quiet few hours.

LOL !

Give me a coupla years!

Any good ideas for mathy games welcome, though. It is a bit of a break to play with game development.

You photoshopped the image just to confuse me, right?

Or it isn't counting them properly.

One or the other.

BTW the thing about flags is ... I don't give a win when you mark flags on all bombs ...

... because you could cheat by placing/unplacing flags until you win (for example: you may have a few squares left and don't want to risk being blown up, so you try flagging/unflagging until you win ... well I won't give a win that way ... you actually have to show the safe squares and risk being blown up.)

Is this right? Discuss ...

You know what? I figured that out later also ... but when ryos posed his puzzle I just assumed I had made another programming error! (Ryos is tricky!)

But any ideas about flags winning or not would be good.

More bugs!

1) I once had a shovel disappear to no avail (I think I may have dropped it between squares), but I haven't gotten this one to repeat.

2) You can flag a square that has been marked clear. Doing so doesn't seem to have any effect on winning (you still win, even if all your clears are marked).

3) I ran out of flags, and it wouldn't let me win. The board below is completely solved (I think), but I hadn't the flags to mark them all.

Uploaded Images

2) I say, can win if all clear spaces are correctly marked.
3) I don't think it makes it too easy, since that info is readily available to the player that is willing to sum them up. Who wants to do that?
4) Or stops when "new game is clicked"; animations get old when we are forced to wait for them.
7) I'll draw up a suggestion later tonight.

This is more about it visually. I don't know if it is just on my computer, but the flags appear very pale and it can be difficult to see them after marking a square.
Apart from that, it is a good game and very addictive.

mathsyperson wrote:

The glitches that I mentioned before are still there as well.

Bomb choice is random, so strange things can happen, but I did add some code to artificially choose bombs to get the density closer to that requested. It has improved the situation, but not completely.

And I am still looking at stopping the "Success" thingy part way through - I know how do it in theory, but in practice it isn't playing fair!

Wow! Much improved! (sorry I never did do that mockup I promised...)

I'll have more useful comments in a bit.